Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru

2008; Duke University Press; Volume: 88; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2008-344

1527-1900

Caroline Winterer,

Latin American history and culture

Knowledge of the Greco-Roman past played a major role in helping early modern Europeans to sort the vast array of New World novelties into a coherent order. But classicism was no monolithic, unchanging tradition imposed by conquering elites to dominate indigenous cultures. In her new book, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru, Sabine MacCormack presents a far more nuanced view of the legacy of Greco-Roman antiquity in the Andean region that became Peru. The book is deeply learned and persuasive, a model of how to write the intellectual history of empires and imperialism.MacCormack shows how humanistic traditions were brought to bear on a transitional moment in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish America, as a new society called “Peru” emerged that was a convergence of indigenous Inca and Spanish elements. Building on the work of such historians as Anthony Grafton and Anthony Pagden, who have revealed the ways in which classical antiquity provided a lens for understanding New World empires and peoples, MacCormack proposes something even more ambitious: that classical themes “became constituents of collective consciousness and identity” (p. xv) for the new civil society that emerged in the Andes following the Spanish destruction of the Inca Empire. Classicism, that is, was not only a lens for Europeans to understand the New World. It was the very building block of the new, combined society that emerged.The early modern world MacCormack describes is one of flux at every level, not just among the moderns but among the ancients, whose writings were interpreted anew in part because of the exigencies of New World imperialism. Far from being the deeply familiar companions they had been in the medieval universities and schools, the Greco-Roman authors that were now approached in the quasi-anthropological mode of the humanists appeared strange, pagan, and remote. The ancient writers most often consulted by moderns — Livy, Vergil, and others — had themselves been struggling to comprehend the diverse, shifting geopolitics of the vast Roman Empire, a place of conquest but also of cultural and linguistic syncretism. Viewed not as a fixed tradition but rather as a dynamic series of debates about such central matters as the nature of empires, the origin of language, and the role of cities in the civilizing process, the classical past became what MacCormack calls “a springboard of cognition” (p. 14) for Spaniards to understand the peoples of the Andes in the wake of conquest.Most strikingly, MacCormack shows how several erudite indigenous Andean scholars entered this conversation as they attempted to chronicle the history of the Andes from the era of the Incas through the arrival of the Spanish. Though she might have focused more on the education of these first Andean historians so that we could see how they acquired their extensive knowledge, MacCormack brilliantly reveals how their works reimagined the Greco-Roman legacy. She shows that contact with Spain opened the Andes to the world. Contact brought not just disease and mass death and destruction but also the deep chronology and cultural awareness of Greco-Roman learning. Educated survivors of the Spanish invasion — the people who helped to build the new Peru — did not simply absorb this classical legacy, as though swallowing a rock. Instead erudite Andean elites such as Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, and Garcilaso de la Vega (El Inca) actively intervened in modern scholarship. Andean scholars used humanistic learning not just to fit the history of the Andes — its peoples, its cities, its languages — into a broader framework of global history, they did so in a way that became essential to the contemporaneous Spanish project of writing modern histories of the Spanish people. This is especially clear in chapter 6, subtitled “What Language Can Do.” Here MacCormack shows how Spaniards in Spain interested in tracing the imperial Roman roots of modern Castilian interacted with scholarship emanating from Peru, with its concern to establish Quechua as a genuine language of empire, akin to Latin. Few scholars have shown with MacCormack’s nuance not just how the scholarship of the metropole could feed the periphery, but how the erudition emanating from the periphery nourished the metropole as well.Garcilaso de la Vega exemplifies the themes MacCormack emphasizes in her book. Born in Peru of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca princess, he was a native speaker of Quechua who later wrote a Spanish-language history of the conquest of the Inca, Comentarios reales de los Incas. His elite education schooled him to view the now-destroyed Inca Empire as rivaling Rome in the might of its armies and the prudence of its leaders. Even though he mourned the passing of the Inca Empire, it was the new society of Peru that gave him the tools to fully imagine that past and to sew it into a grand world history that could be published and then read by that larger world. MacCormack notes that his book was translated into French and English and undergirded later efforts, from Lafitau’s Customs of the American Indians (1724) to Tupac Amaru’s 1780 indigenous Peruvian uprising (p. 65). “Garcilaso’s Peru,” writes MacCormack, “was built in equal parts on Inca and Spanish traditions, and both reached into his own present and beyond” (p. 262).By showing how the early modern humanistic project was built partly through New World encounters and by suggesting how a new society emerged through a creative, syncretic reading of the classical past by the conquerors, the conquered, and their combined descendants, MacCormack has contributed greatly to the intellectual history of early modern Spain and Spanish America. More than this, she has offered a model of how such investigations might proceed elsewhere on the edges of European empires.