Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Franklin Pease G.Y. (1939-1999)

2000; Duke University Press; Volume: 80; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-80-2-333

1527-1900

Noble David Cook,

Latin American history and culture

I first met Franklin and Mariana Pease on the docks of Lima’s port of El Callao in late January 1968, as I disembarked from a voyage from Barcelona, with my family, boxes of note cards, books and suitcases filled with household items. The Peases were forewarned by a letter from Seville by fellow Peruvian historian Miguel Maticorena Estrada, who had already spent years of research in the Archive of the Indies, and we must have been easy to pick out from other passengers. I was described as the typical “gringo,” tall, slender, and shorthaired. In spite of those constraints, Franklin Pease had been told that I too was interested in early colonial Peru, and especially in studying the impact of conquest on the peoples of Tawantinsuyu. Waves and smiles, then the warm embraces and introductions indicated acceptance into the Pease family, and marked the beginning of a close friendship. My experience was not unique; indeed, hundreds of others found the same warmth of personality and willingness to accept others at face value and open the door of their home and heart.Franklin Pease García-Yrigoyen was born in Lima on 28 November1939. His father, Admiral Franklin Pease Olivera, was a career naval officer, and his mother was María García-Yrigoyen. His paternal grandfather was an English photographer who had settled in Lima in the late nineteenth century. A childhood illness left Franklin’s hearing permanently impaired. Perhaps as a consequence he became an avid reader. Later in life he would sometimes turn off his hearing aid to muffle the sounds of the outside world so he could devote full attention to his texts. He was a voracious reader, from the classics to modern mysteries. He had a special affection for Borges, and fellow Peruvian anthropologist and novelist José María Argüedas, whose suicide left a major mark on Franklin during his formative years.Franklin Pease, endowed with a prodigious memory, was educated by Jesuits. As a youth he traveled with his father, which led him briefly to Iquitos on the Amazon River, and residence of several months in Buenos Aires. After primary schooling he entered the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú; he earned a bachelor’s degree in Humanities in 1964. A law degree followed the next year, but the legal profession did not provide the stimulus that the past of his country did. He toyed with archaeology, but found the intellectual debates of history more compelling. His first book, Atahualpa (1964), indicates his growing interest in Andean foundations, as opposed to the creole history of the coast. He was much influenced by Peruvian historians Raúl Porras Bar-renechea, Jorge Basadre, Guillermo Lohmann Villena, and Pedro Rodríguez, all of whom stressed the need to critically evaluate the sources, and move beyond traditional history of national heroes and military conflict. In 1966 Franklin was awarded a fellowship by the Instituto Riva Agüero and the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica to study in Spain. He scoured collections in Madrid, and found treasures in the Archive of the Indies in Seville. His dissertation was based largely on this research. In 1967 he was awarded a doctorate in history at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. His dissertation subject appeared as a book: Los últimos incas del Cuzco (1972). This was soon followed by El dios creador andino (1973). Both became classic texts in the field. At the same time, as so many other Peruvian scholars did in order to make ends meet, he was employed simultaneously at the University of Lima (1964– 68), and the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (he began in 1962, and the position became a permanent one in 1965).Pease’s interest in “Andean” religion and political form led him to John V. Murra and John H. Rowe, as well as to María Rostworowski de Diez Canseco. The combination of archaeology, anthropology, and history, forming a new approach, ethnohistory, appealed much in the early 1970s. His intellectual debt to Argüedas, who added the dimension of oral and written experience, and the critical demands of the canons of history led Franklin to believe that the new interdisciplinary approach was a valuable one. The combination made him a natural to work at the National Museum of History; he was head of investigations and publications between 1964 and 1968, then director from 1969 to 1974. During these years he was closely associated with the Museum’s journal Historia y Cultura. Within the Museum’s manuscript collections was a late-sixteenth-century inspection and census of the crown repartimiento of Yanque Collaguas, a document comparable to the earlier visitas of Huánuco and Chucuito that were important sources for the study of highland peoples at the local level. He had turned the document over to a group of students for transcription, then analysis. It was at this juncture, in 1974, that I returned to Lima, as a Fulbright lecturer to teach quantitative methods in historical analysis to students at the Universidad Católica. Generously, Franklin invited me to participate in the Collaguas project. At this point he embarked on his first serious venture into field research, to situate spatially the visita of the Collaguas. The group he led included students we shared at La Católica, plus historians from Arequipa—Eusebio Quiroz and Alejandro Málaga Medina. The discoveries of new visitas in the parish archive of Yanque helped open up the Colca Valley to a new generation of outside researchers. His edited first volume, Col-laguas I (1977), of a projected series, included chapters by many of those who participated, as well as the full text of the 1591 visita. Franklin demanded much of his students, but he was at the same time totally supportive of their career development. Many in this group continue to play a significant role in Peru’s historical community, as teachers, editors, journalists, and administrators. Indeed throughout his long teaching career, as well as his editorial work and his nurturing, Franklin has left an amazingly rich student legacy, with solidly formed professionals not only in Peru, but in Europe and the United States as well.In addition to his writing, Franklin was dedicated to the institutional development of his university. Teaching from the mid-1960s to the end, he was elected dean of the Faculty of Letters (1980–83). He was re-elected several times, and held the post until his death. He edited the college’s scholarly journal, Humanidades, from 1967 to 1974, and from 1975 to 1982 he served as general editor of the university’s press. Most important, in 1977 he established the journal Histórica at the Universidad Católica and directed it until his death. This journal, stressing the link between the related disciplines of the social sciences and the humanities, became the benchmark for Peruvian historical journals. It has provided a venue for both younger and more mature students of Andean history, and competes in all respects with the best journals in the field. Significantly, from 1983 to 1986 he took a leave from the university to take over the directorship of the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú. Here too he left an imprint on the institution’s publication series as well as its acquisitions policies.Franklin established close scholarly ties with the global academic community. During the course of his research and editorial activities, he worked with numerous specialists: John V. Murra, John H. Rowe, Rolena Adorno, Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, Georgette Dorn, Pierre Duviols, John Fisher, David Brading, Shozo Masuda, Juan Gil, Consuelo Varela, and many others. In 1979 he had his first term as visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1980 he received a Fulbright-Hays grant for investigations on early colonial Andean texts in libraries in the United States. In 1982–83 Pease was awarded the John S. Guggenheim Fellowship, and he returned to Berkeley as a visiting scholar. Later in 1983 he was a visiting professor at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas of the Instituto Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo in Madrid. In 1987 Pease was a visiting scholar at Cambridge University, as well as a visiting professor at the University of Santiago de Chile. In 1988 he was a visiting professor at the Escuela de Altos Estudios en Ciencias Sociales in Paris. In 1989 he was a Fulbright scholar in residence at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University. He was a member of the editorial boards of Historia Boliviana, Cuadernos de Historia, and Colonial Latin American Review. In the Spring of 1997 he was the Bacardi distinguished visiting professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville.Through the course of his academic career, he published over 125 articles and book chapters. Pease read widely, probing the minds of historical theorizers of England, Germany, France, Italy, and the United States, and throughout his career one sees a continuing interest in the construction of history. One of his most important contributions, Del Tawantinsuyu a la historia del Perú (1978) received the Conference of Latin American History’s (CLAH) Howard F. Cline Memorial Prize for the best work in ethnohistory. The important Curacas reci-procidad y riqueza appeared in 1992. One of the more long-lasting contributions will no doubt be Las crónicas y los Andes (1995), a massive re-evaluation of the Andean colonial writers. Franklin became increasingly concerned that history needed to be brought to the public in a strong, readable narrative style that avoided ideological extremes. In his two-volume survey of Peru’s past, Perú: Hombre e historia, entre el siglo XVI y el XVIII (1992) and Perú: Hombre e historia. La República (1993) he attempted to do that. A condensed version, the Breve historia contemporánea del Perú (1995) was aimed at the whole of Spanish speaking America. In another vein, the 1988 synthesis, Imperio Inca, was immediately popular; a Japanese version was in an eighth edition by 1994. For Peruvian students Los incas: una introducción (1991) became standard reading. Edited anthologies El pensamiento mítico (1982), and Los mitos en la región andina (1985) had popular audiences. In 1990 he received the Rafael Heliodoro Valle Prize for history in Mexico, and in 1994 he was awarded the Palmas Magisteriales en el Grado de Amauta (Peru).Franklin Pease’s edited scholarly volumes are equally important. In addition to the visita of the Collaguas, he edited the widely used two volume tribute, Historia, problema y promesa: homenaje a Jorge Basadre (1978). He prepared a critical version of Raúl Porras Barrenechea, Los cronistas del Perú y otros ensayos (1986). Both have strong historiographical components. He has edited numerous texts of the colonial chroniclers, including Gregorio García’s, El origen de los indios de el Nuevo Mundo (1981), and Pedro de Cieza de León’s, Crónica del Perú. Parte primera (1984). Working with William B. Taylor he co-edited Violence, Resistance and Survival in the Americas. Native Americans and the Legacy of Conquest (1994). For a number of years, Franklin Pease has been editing new critical versions of the standard chronicles in the “Colección de Clásicos Peru-anos.” He has edited individual volumes, and has overseen the work of other scholars and students. His aim was to produce a “corrected” version on the basis of the best and closest texts to the original manuscripts. The intent was to provide ultimately the results of a “complete set” in the form of compact disks to serve as the foundation for comparative analysis.There was a public as well as a private Franklin, but the line between the two was a relatively thin one. Franklin’s boundless energy and enthusiasm were infectious. Those who entered the private life saw the constant good humor, the spontaneity of wit, the brilliant narrative powers to captivate, alongside the loving husband and father and doting grandparent. He married Mariana Mould, also an historian, over thirty years ago. They conducted research together in Seville in 1966, and it was there that their first daughter was born. Later in Lima, for several years Mariana worked in the Fulbright Commission, and subsequently was in charge of Peru–U.S. University exchange programs. The Pease home in Miraflores was always open to those visitors, who often became part of an extended family. Few couples worked together as closely as Franklin and Mariana, and not only did they share their love for Peru’s history and the protection of its patrimony but they remained best friends throughout life’s journey.Franklin’s journey was cut unexpectedly short, at the height of his intellectual prowess. Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in early 1999, and in spite of operations and treatment in Houston, Texas, even the best modern medical knowledge was incapable of checking his aggressive illness. Treatment was in part supported by generous donations of his friends, through accounts set up by the Pontificia Universidad Católica, as well as the Conference for Latin American History. Franklin was unable to thank all who helped, but he always wanted to make certain that everyone knew how much he and his family appreciated the outpouring of support, even if he was unable to write personally. On 13 November 1999, just shy of his sixtieth birthday, he died in Lima, surrounded by his loving wife Mariana, three married children and four grandchildren, as well as numerous friends. He will be remembered and missed by all who knew him. His legacy lives on.