Negotiating Evangelicalism and New Age Tourism Through Quechua Ontologies in Cuzco, Peru.

Abstract

This dissertation addresses how ideologies of social hierarchy articulate hegemonic social orders across ontological differences. It characterizes the dominant ideologies of social hierarchy produced in the city of Cuzco, proposes a framework to understand Quechua ontologies, and analyses how the people of a rural Quechua community negotiate with urban ideologies of social hierarchy in a conflictive context. Some community members expect to get benefits from New Age tourism by cultivating indigenous practices, while others, who have converted to Evangelicalism, condemn them. Narratives of modernity are ideological mechanisms that produce and legitimate hierarchy. The dominant narratives of modernity produced in the city of Cuzco — the former Inka imperial capital— articulate seemingly contradictory and interlocking public discourses that effect a double displacement of Quechua speakers: as impoverished and backward peasants, locked out of the “modern” urban Cuzco; and as relics of the Inka past that is both represented and controlled by urban elites. The analysis stresses how narratives of modernity celebrating the Inka past and being at the cornerstone of the Cuzqueño regionalist nationalism, are fundamental for the reproduction of a hegemonic social order. Quechua ontologies embedded in practice routinely breach modern ontological presuppositions, attributing personhood to all named places of the landscape. The analytical distinction between ontology and ideology is central to demonstrate how narratives of modernity are negotiated in Quechua ontological terms and to discuss how ideologies can become hegemonic across ontological differences. Hapu is one of the rural Q’ero communities regarded as the hallmark of Quechua authenticity in urban Cuzco and as keepers of Inka wisdom in foreign New Age circles. Hapu converts to Evangelicalism reject many Quechua practices, while others, cultivating them, expect to establish beneficial alliances with New Age visitors. While the different paths taken by opposing factions within Hapu reproduce the presuppositions of their ontologies such as the personhood of the places, they elaborate very different ideological responses to the dominant narratives of modernity. Both Catholics and Evangelicals challenge yet reproduce the urban ideologies of social hierarchy by elaborating distinctive ways to relate to indigeneity in their efforts to reach for a better life.