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“Failing to Marvel”: Atahualpa's Encounter with the Word

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Patricia Seed
Patricia Seed*
Affiliation:
Rice University
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The encounter between Atahualpa and the Spaniards in Cajamarca Plaza on 16 November 1532 provided the dramatic moment that has been highlighted in narratives of the conquest of Peru by generations of historians, from Francisco de Jerez and Titu Cusi Yupanqui to William Prescott. More recently, James Lockhart's highly influential Spanish Peru (1968) and its companion, The Men of Cajamarca (1972), have defined the striking encounter at Cajamarca as the starting point for understanding the conquest history of Peru. Edward Said and Peter Hulme, however, have suggested that within the genre of conquest narrative the conflict among different versions of the same event mainly revolves around the issue of where the story should start. If so, readers are impelled to take the designated beginning of the history of Spanish Peru—the events at Cajamarca—as not merely a dramatic framing device for telling history but as a choice implying an ideological understanding of the Spanish role in Peru. In recent American historiography, this choice of beginning with the events at Cajamarca has become a means of telling a classic tale of upward social mobility for Spaniards, one that starts with the capture of treasure at Cajamarca.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , 1991 , pp. 7 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

∗

This article is a revised version of a paper given at the panel “Texts and Conquests” at the Latin American Studies Association meeting, 17–19 March 1988, New Orleans. The author wishes to thank fellow panel participants Peter Hulme, Rolena Adorno, and José Rabasa for their comments as well as Michael Harbsmeier, Hayden White, and the LAR editors and anonymous reviewers.

References

Notes

1. James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1532–1560: A Colonial Society (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968); and The Men of Cajamarca (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972).

2. Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976); and Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters (London: Methuen, 1986), 172.

3. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (Paris: Editorial Plon, 1955).

4. Jacques Derrida, “The Violence of the Letter,” in Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1976). See also Roland Barthes, “The Writing Lesson, ” in Image/Music/Text, translated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 170–78.

5. Bartolomé de Las Casas attributes the distinction to Aristotle's Politics. But as Anthony Pagden argues, Las Casas must have been thinking of Thomas Aquinas's commentary Sententia Libri Politicorum because the distinction does not appear in Aristotle's writings. See Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 126–32, 225, n. 18. Ancient classical writers like Cicero cited speech, rather than writing, as the source of man's special distinction, the quality that “has united us in the bonds of justice, law and civil order, this that has separated us from savagery and barbarism.” See Cicero, De natura deorum, translated by H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933), vol. 2, lix. 148, p. 267.

6. Domingo de Soto summarizes their positions in “Este es un traslado de un summario que por comisión de la congregación que Su Majestad mandó juntar en Valladolid el año de cincuenta, coligió el muy reverendo y doctísimo padre, maestro fray Domingo de Soto.” See Bartolomé de Las Casas, Tratados (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1965), 281–82. See also Lewis Hanke, All Mankind Is One (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), 83–84, 87.

7. According to Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinowe, “Studying discursive formations requires a double reduction. Not only must the investigator bracket the truth claims of the serious speech acts he is investigating—Husserl's phenomenological reduction—he must also bracket the meaning claims.” See Dreyfus and Rabinowe, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 67.

8. Pizarro justifies his account in this manner, “Como los escritores no escriben lo que vieron sino que oyeron, no pueden dar clara ni verdadera noticia de lo que escriben. … acordé sacar a luz … como persona que se ha hallado en estas provincias desde el principio de la conquista hasta el fin.” See Pedro Pizarro, Relación del descubrimiento y conquista de los reinos del Perú (originally published in 1571) in Biblioteca Peruana (Lima: Editores Técnicos Asociados, 1968), 449. An even better-known observation is Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo's sarcastic comment about “others who from Spain easily presume to write of the Indies without having seen them.” See his Historia general y natural de las Indias (Asunción: Editorial Guaranía, 1944), 1:29, 39. See also Victor Frankl, El antijovio de Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada y las concepciones de realidad y verdad en la época de contrareforma y del manerismo (Madrid: Ediciones Cultural Hispánica, 1963), 82–101.

9. For an example of a “realist” version of the encounter between Atahualpa and Fray Vicente, see Raúl Porras Barrenechea, Las relaciones primitivas de la conquista del Perú (Paris: Imprimeries Les Presses Modernes, 1937), p. 86, n. 33. A wholly Eurocentric “realist” version of the encounter is John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1970), 33–41, 549–50.

10. According to Michel de Certeau, “Realism, or the legitimation of discourse by its ‘references,‘ originates with the author, the person legitimized by social credentials, and is transferred from the author to his text.” See his Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, translated by Brian Massumi, foreword by Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 32.

11. According to Barthes, “Narration can only receive its meaning from the world which makes use of it.” See his “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” in Image/Music/Text, 115. Hayden White glosses this observation as “to mistake a ‘meaning’ (which is always constituted rather than found) for ‘reality’ (which is always found rather than constituted).” See White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 36.

12. Antonio de Nebrija, Gramática Castellana, photographic reproduction of the 1492 first edition (Halle, Belgium: Max Niemeyer, 1909), folio 1.

13. For an excellent analysis of conquest via language in the Philippines, see Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988).

14. Narratives of resistance and accommodation are a type of story often told in history and anthropology books and articles in which the heroic Indians or workers bravely resist Spanish or capitalist efforts at domination and manage either to subvert the dominant system to accommodate their own ends or to die heroically while resisting. Hence comes the appellation “narratives of resistance and accommodation.” Such stories were the dominant mode of explanation employed in writing on Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s.

15. See Diego González Holguín, Vocabulario de la lengua general de todo el Perú llamada lengua quechua (originally published in 1608; Lima: Imprenta Santa María, 1952), 148, 507–8. Regina Harrison cites different words for “understanding” in Quechua used by Pachacuti Yamqui (1613) and the lexicon of González Holguín. See Harrison, “Modes of Discourse: The Relación de antigüedades deste reyno del Pirú by Joan de Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua,” in From Oral to Written Expressions: Native Andean Chronicles of the Early Colonial Period, edited by Rolena Adorno (Syracuse, N.Y.: Maxwell School of Citizenship, 1982), 65–99, esp. 86–87. On the function of taking from discourse for future use in Europe before the seventeenth century, see Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1966).

16. Tzetzan Todorov, The Conquest of America (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), translated by Richard Howard, 29–33.

17. Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), 33–34.

18. Francisco de Jerez, Verdadera relación de la conquista del Perú (originally published in 1534; Madrid: Historia 16, 1985), 13–17, 22–23. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

19. Ibid., 41.

20. Pizarro's “authorization” of the narrative is invoked more subtly in the next paragraph, where Jerez indirectly implicates Pizarro as the author of the lengthy description of the town, its inhabitants, and surrounding terrain by using Pizarro's order to search for appropriate lodgings as the narrative rationale for describing the place where the encounter is to take place. Ibid., 103.

21. Jerez is reluctant even to credit Atahualpa with curiosity, a trait that would undermine Jerez's portrait of the chief's haughtiness.

22. Hernando Pizarro, “La carta de Hernando Pizarro a la Audiencia de Santo Domingo, de 23 de noviembre de 1533,” in Tres testigos de la conquista del Perú, edited by Miguel Muñoz de San Pedro (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1953); see also Miguel de Estete, Noticia del Perú (originally published in 1535) in Biblioteca Peruana (Lima: Editores Técnicos Asociados, 1968), 1:345–402. The first published account by Cristóbal Mena also recounts the friar calling the Indians “dogs.” See Cristóbal de Mena's “anonymous” La conquista del Perú llamada Nueva Castilla (originally published in 1534), in Raúl Porras Barrenechea, Las relaciones primitivas de la Conquista del Perú, 79–101, esp. 85–86.

23. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Demócrates segundo, o de las justas causas de la guerra contra los indios (originally published in 1535; Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1951), 35. See also Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 117–18. This idea was echoed by Juan Maldonado in 1549. See Francisco Rico, “Laudes litterarum,” in Homenaje a Julio Caro Baroja (Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 1978), 895–914, 906–7

24. Sepúlveda, Demócrates segundo, 78–79.

25. Mena, La conquista, 85; Juan Ruiz de Arce, “Relación de los servicios en Indias,” edited by Conde de Canilleros, Boletín de la Academia de la Historia 102 (1935):327–84, esp. 362; and Miguel de Estete's Noticia del Perú, 1:345–402.

26. The wonder that natives experience at writing has been recorded in chronicles as diverse as Jean Léry's sixteenth-century account of the Tupi in Brazil, Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil, originally published in 1578: “I used to write a few sentences. Then, in reading to them afterward, in their eyes it all seemed like some kind of sorcery. One would say to another, ‘Is it not a marvel?‘” Cited by Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, translated by Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 214. Other sources also reflect this theme: the account of an eighteenth-century Ibo, The Interesting Narrative of Alaudah Equianoh or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself, 4th ed. (Dublin: Printed by the author, 1791); J. Williams's account of Wesleyan missionaries among the Raratonga in the Cook Islands (1837), cited by Brian Street in “Orality and Literacy as Ideological Constructions: Some Problems in Cross-Cultural Studies,” Culture and History 2 (1987):13–14; and Thomas Hariot's Roanoke Voyages (originally published in 1585), in The Roanoke Voyages, edited by David Beers Quinn (London: Hakluyt Society, 1955), 375–77. An almost identical scene of “marveling” at the Bible is described as having taken place under a tree outside Delhi in 1817. See Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817,” in Europe and Its Others, edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iverson, and Diana Loxley (Colchester: University of Essex, 1985), 2:89–106. As recently as 1955, French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss describes writing as one of “the marvels I had brought” to the Nambikwara of Brazil in 1938. See his Tristes Tropiques, 289. See also Michael Harbsmeier, “Early Travel to Europe: Some Remarks on the Magic of Writing,” in Europe and Its Others, 1:72–88.

27. Titu Cusi Yupanqui, Relación de la conquista del Perú, originally published in 1570 (Lima: Ediciones de la Biblioteca Universitaria, 1963). The original Spanish title was “Instrucción del Inga don Diego de Castro Titu Cusi Yupangui para el muy Ilustre Senor el Licenciado Lope García de Castro.” For a useful commentary, see Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, “Writing as Resistance: Peruvian History and the Relación of Titu Cusi Yupangui,” in Adorno, From Oral to Written Expression, 55–57.

28. Frank Salomon, “Chronicles of the Impossible: Notes on Three Peruvian Indigenous Historians, ” in Adorno, From Oral to Written Expression, 13.

29. Because establishing narrative authority is a European device, how this authority was to be created may have been discussed between Titu Cusi and the priest or even added by the friar to whom the account was dictated in order to legitimize this interpretation of the event.

30. Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales de los Incas: Part II, Historia general del Perú (originally published in 1617). The edition cited here is Edición Carmelo Sáenz de Santa María, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles (hereafter BAE) (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1960).

31. For the humanist (European) background on Garcilaso's narrative pose as “translator, ” see Margarita Zamora, Language, Authority, and Indigenous History in the Comentarios Reales de los Incas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 12–84. On the evolution of this position in Garcilaso's texts, see Susan Jákfalvi-Leiva, Tradición, escritura y violencia colonizadora: un estudio de la obra del Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1984). My own view is that Garcilaso mystifies his origins for a Spanish audience by deploying the narrative pose as a “Quechua speaker,” a reality not penetrable for Spanish readers. His additional invocation of the unexplained “tradición de los quipus” to account for his knowledge of the scene with the book strikes me as simply another move intended to mystify his narrative authority and make it exotic.

32. Zamora, Language, Authority, and Indigenous History, 133. While Garcilaso's disdain for Felipe may have stemmed partially from his regional origins (Felipe was not a Cuzqueño), Garcilaso's attacks are couched wholly in the language of Spanish status markers.

33. Garcilaso uses a confession guide of 1585 written in Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara in which the question “Are you a baptized Christian?” is translated with only the verb “to be” in Quechua and “baptized” and “Christian” in Castilian. The same thing occurs with the question “Do you know Christian doctrine?” where the verb form “do you know?” is asked in Quechua and the rest in Castilian. See also Rubén Vargas Ugarte, Concilios limenses (Lima: n.p., 1951–1954), vols. 1–3. For a similar critique of Garcilaso's treatment of the interpreter, see Regina Harrison, Signs, Songs, and Memory: Translating Quechua Language and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 40–43.

34. “Aún nombrarle [a Dios] no saben sino por nuestro vocablo.” See José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias (originally published in 1590), edited by Edmundo O'Gorman (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1962), 220.

35. In the Latin version that Las Casas presented verbally at Valladolid in 1550–51 (the Apologética historia, chap. 33), he argued: “What language will the messengers speak so as to be understood by the Indians? Latin, Greek, Spanish? Arabic? The Indians know none of these languages. Perhaps we imagine that the soldiers are so holy that Christ will grant them the gift of tongues so that they will be understood by the Indians? … No law, constitution, or precept is binding on anyone unless the words of the language in which it is proposed are clearly understood.” In Defense of the Indians, translated and edited by Stafford Poole (De Kalb: University of Northern Illinois Press, 1974), 217–18. On Garcilaso's familiarity with Las Casas's work, see Zamora, Language, Authority, and Indigenous History, 106. Roberto Fernández Retamar's observation could easily apply to Garcilaso: “We have been so thoroughly steeped in colonialism that we read with real respect only those anticolonialist authors disseminated from the Metropolis.” See Caliban and Other Essays, translated by Edward Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 18.

36. This theme appears in Las Casas even earlier than his critique of language. See Del único modo de atraer a los pueblos a la verdadera religión (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1942). Although the text (thought to have been composed circa 1537) was not published until the twentieth century, Las Casas expounded its ideas frequently. See Agustín Millares Carlo, “Advertencia,” vii; and Lewis Hanke, “Introducción,” xxxiii.

37. “Decimos que cuando el P. fray Vicente llegó a hablar al Inca, el Inca se admiró grandemente de ver la forma del fraile dominicano, de la barba y corona raído como la trayen los religiosos, y del hábito largo, y de la cruz de palma, que en las manos llevaba, y un libro que era la suma de Silvestre: otros dicen que la Biblia; tome cada uno lo que más le agradare” (emphasis added). See BAE 143:46.

38. Garcilaso criticizes Fray Valverde only for the way he delivered the requirement: “seca y muy áspera, sin ningún jugo de blandura, ni otro gusto alguno” (“dryly and very gruffly, without any gentleness or other refinement”), BAE 143:48. Even here, however, Garcilaso attributes this criticism to other Spaniards, thus avoiding directly criticizing the Spaniards himself.

39. Guarnan Poma de Ayala states, “Le dixo que le daría [a Pizarro y Almagro] much oro y plata para que se bolbiesen.” See his Nueva crónica y buen gobierno (originally published in 1615), in the Spanish edition edited by Rolena Adorno and John Murra (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1980), 353. See also the excellent critical study of Guarnan Poma by Rolena Adorno, Writing and Resistance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). According to Guillermo Ludeña de la Vega, camaricos are work obligations or orders. See Vocabulario y quechua utilizado por el cronista indio Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala (Lima: Perúgraph Editores, 1982).

40. Poma de Ayala, Nueva crónica, 357. Sabine MacCormack maintains that Francisco Gómara was the first to suggest that Atahualpa held the book to his ear, expecting the book to speak. See MacCormack, “Atahualpa y el libro,” Revista de Indias 68 (1988):693–711. Whether Guarnan Poma borrowed from Gomara, or the story was an orally communicated native legend that both Gómara and Guarnan Poma had heard, or both authors derived it independently from native sources is less important than the cultural interpretation that Guarnan Poma provides. MacCormack, however, classifies Guarnan Poma and Garcilaso as “Andean” authors rather than as situated ambiguously between Spanish and Quechua traditions.

41. Titu Cusi, Relación de la conquista, 15. Guarnan Poma himself satirized the act of reading as crazy people talking to inanimate objects: “Y que de día y noche hablauan cada uno con sus papeles, quilca.” See Guarnan Poma, Nueva crónica, 353.

42. Nueva crónica, 8, 60. For a skeptical interpretation of these pages, see Rolena Adorno, “The Language of History in Guarnan Poma's Nueva crónica y buen gobierno,” in Adorno, From Oral to Written Expression, 132.

43. Certeau, Heterologies, 32.

44. Dreyfus and Rabinowe define these cultural limitations on discourse as “the system of rules that govern what sort of talk … can in a given period be taken seriously.” See Dreyfus and Rabinowe, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 66. Dominick LaCapra has argued that sticking to canonical literature is sufficient provided that one reads it critically. Such a limitation, however, forces the exclusion of critical discourses that lie outside the canon, with the result being that the objections of women, blacks, natives, and those involuntarily subject to colonial powers are effectively eliminated. See LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 113

45. For specific examples of how this belief in the cultural superiority of writing functioned in medieval Europe, see Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983).