The late seventeenth-century series of paintings of the Corpus Christi procession in colonial Cuzco, Peru, housed at the Archbishop’s Museum of Religious Art in that city, appears at first sight to be an ethnohistorian’s dream. Portraying the devotees of Cuzco’s indigenous parishes in procession with their patron saints, these canvases depict individuals in Inka dress, suggesting their exceptional value as ethnographic documents of the pre-Columbian past. In fact, such use of colonial visual materials has been the rule among Andeanists from most disciplinary backgrounds. Carolyn Dean has, however, forced us to rethink the significance of colonial Peruvian art in her innovative and multilayered book, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ. Dean’s study of the colonial Andean nobility manifest in these images argues that the depiction of colonial hereditary lords in Inka regalia represents not so much a resurgence of a pre-Columbian symbolic system, but instead resituates the historical memory of this iconography within a tableau that trumpets the triumph of Spanish Christianity and serves as a vehicle for embodying indigenous alterity. Corpus Christi thus functioned as a stage for the profanation of Inka cosmology, not its revival. Simultaneously, Andean symbols were manipulated by hereditary lords to consolidate their political positions within a colonial indigenous power structure whose contours developed under the guidance of the Spanish crown. For Dean, then, colonial representations of the Inka cannot be taken at face value and must be reevaluated within the administrative and religious system of Spanish colonialism.

During the past decade, students of colonial Latin America have reluctantly adopted the notion of hybridity to refer to the complex amalgam of cultural forms that marked the heterogeneous social climate of Spanish colonialism. Hybridity not only paints a deceptive image of the mixing of primordial cultural entities and pays scant heed to the transformations that unfolded during three centuries of colonial rule, but is also rooted in a metaphor based on notions of race that only developed in the nineteenth century, long after continental Latin America won its independence from Spain. Syncretism, the terminological predecessor to hybridity, is also a highly problematic model, insofar as it provides little in the way of the conceptual tools for making sense of the exercise of power and agency within the multiethnic colonial arena. Hence, scholars have opted in favor of the Latin American metaphor of mestizaje; its English translation, miscegenation, fails to capture the complex combination of genetic, cultural, and political processes that mark this term as both a hegemonic ideological formation and a sociological process. At the root of colonial scholars’ quandary lies the difficulty of interpreting through a simplistic bipolar theoretical model that in reality was a complex and heterogeneous social field marked by ceaseless borrowing from contemporary social groups and from the distant Andean and European pasts. Drawing as much on her own discipline of art history as on anthropology, history, and literary studies, Dean demonstrates that it is possible to interpret this ever-changing multiplicity without recourse to such binomial constructs.

Dean’s achievement is manifested most clearly in four significant interpretive moves. First, she makes the colonial period and colonial cultural forms the locus of her inquiry, distinguishing them from pre-Columbian symbolism and iconography. While this might seem obvious to scholars working in other parts of the world, traditional ethnohistorical treatments of colonial American indigenous expressive culture and religion saw native society as caught in a dialectic of culture loss and acculturation. In this sense, scholars read aboriginal features ahistorically, identifying them as persistences, rather than as products of what the literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt has called a “contact zone,” where cultural codes and practices are disputed and contested by native people and Europeans alike. In Dean’s view, the continued presence of Inka icons in these paintings is marked in particular by the use of textiles, headdresses, and jewelry, which hark back to pre-Columbian symbols of royal power, as they simultaneously validate their wearers as faithful Christians and members of a colonial power group.

This focus on colonial subjects who had never directly experienced Inka rule, but instead deployed its visual memory a century later, leads Dean to argue that what this pageantry conveys is more properly understood as the insertion of European utterances within an Andean syntax. Particularly persuasive is her focus on ornaments in the depictions of the nobility of indigenous parishes. For example, unlike their Inka antecedents, the pectorals shown in these canvases were highly naturalistic and employed European iconographic motifs, hence her reference to European utterances. Nevertheless, these objects were employed within a colonial indigenous social hierarchy that was enacted in and manipulated through Corpus ceremony, hence their Andean syntax. Note here, however, that this syntax is appreciated by Dean as Andean, not as Inka, that is, as colonial (but indigenous) in nature.

Like scholars concerned with issues of hybridity, but unlike students of syncretism, Dean is highly sensitive to issues of power in and the ritual context of these canvases. The Andean nobility depicted in these images was, clearly, ensnared in a ritual complex meant to profane Inka cosmology. Nonetheless, they simultaneously used the memory of this cosmology to their own political ends as a symbolic tool for their own internecine struggles, distancing them from indigenous commoners who would rise up against the indigenous nobility in some parts of the Andes a century later. Thus, more so than expressing their capitulation to Spanish rule, these paintings witnessed the hereditary lords’ progressive enfeeblement. In the process, however, these nobles also constituted a menace to Spanish rule. As Dean argues, the hereditary lords’ adoption of Inka heraldry represented a refusal to segment history into periods separated by the great divide of the conquest: In this sense, the nobility’s use of “performed effigies” of the Inka was empowering. Dean’s analysis breaks new ground in its rejection of a simplistic resistance model on the one hand, or a unitary insistence on acquiescence on the other.

Furthermore, the binomial model opposing primordial “Indians” to historical Europeans mutes the the colonial world’s heterogeneity, of which the native nobility was painfully aware. Dean ends her discussion of the Corpus Christi paintings with a probing analysis of the largest canvas, the Processional Finale, which depicts the conclusion of the procession as it enters the cathedral. Unlike the other canvases, which portray Inka descendants in pre-Columbian dress, this painting shows the indigenous nobility in European attire, flanked by an arquebus corps decked in non-Inka dress. Dean argues that the natives shown in this canvas are Cañaris and Chachapoyas, ethnic groups who allied themselves with the Spaniards against the Inkas, and who inhabited the parish of Santa Ana, where the canvas hung. Employing chronicle and archival documentation of the centuries-long struggles between non-Inka hereditary lords and the Inka nobility in the colonial period, Dean persuasively argues that this painting authorized a competing version of the indigenous past that fed into the development of conflicting colonial-era native identities in a heterogeneous city.

Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ opens fertile ground for anthropologists and historians, not just for art historians, insofar as it forces us to reconceptualize the place of pre-Columbian symbolism and the memory of the its past within the colonial world. It achieves this through the nuanced interpretation of visual materials within the broader context of the consolidation of an indigenous nobility and the conformation of a cityscape that validated their political legitimacy through procession and ritual. If I have one criticism of this book, it is that Dean frequently looks to theoretical discussions of hybridity in order to support her arguments, instead of using them as jumping-off points from which she can argue for a more complex interpretation of the colonial encounter. Her own analysis of Cuzqueño colonial culture is infinitely more compelling and nuanced, transcending such imported models in novel and convincing ways.