The Incas and sacred space in colonial Cuzco

Gabriela Ramos is lecturer in Latin American History at the University of Cambridge, and author the Death and Conversion in the Andes: Cuzco and Lima 1532-1670 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010) winner of the Howard F. Cline Prize awarded by the Conference on Latin American History in 2011.
Her talk will explore the ways in which the sacred space of the city of Cuzco was modified to facilitate religious conversion. She argues that the role of the Inca nobility was crucial in this process.

Reviews about Death and Conversion in the Andes:

Gabriela Ramos reveals the extent to which Christianizing death was essential for the conversion of the indigenous population to Catholicism. Ramos argues that understanding the relation between death and conversion in the Andes involves not only considering the obvious attempts to destroy the cult of the dead, but also investigating a range of policies and strategies whose application demanded continuous negotiation between Spaniards and Andeans (editorial review).

Ramos brilliantly demonstrates that, beginning with the execution of Atahualpa [the last Inca emperor], death and the dead were one of the great colonial sites of ongoing contestation about both the here and now and the hereafter. In an exquisitely researched study, Ramos traces the shift from pre-Columbian to colonial Andean funerary rituals and the differing ways that they became the center of how Andeans and Europeans communicated and exchanged their visions of power and the sacred,? in a true dance of death.
Thomas B. F. Cummins, Harvard University

Sponsored by the History Department. Free and Open to the Public.

hm 11/9/11