Pastoral Quechua: The history of Christian translation in Peru, 1550--1650

Roughly between 1550 and 1650 the Spanish colonial Church in Peru produced a substantial corpus of Quechua texts for use in catechetical and liturgical performance in the Indian parishes. The dissertation engages a series of questions surrounding this literature---and, more broadly, the creation of a Christian language in Quechua---by combining the formal analysis of the extant texts with the archival reconstruction of their sites of production and performance. Special attention is given to three broad issues: (1) variability in translation practices and its connection to political and ideological changes and splits within the colonial regime; (2) the management of performance practices and of poetic and grammatical cues to guide native interpretations; and (3) the use of terms and tropes derived from native Andean religious languages in explicitly "syncretic" ways.; Beyond its implications for the cultural history of the Andes, the dissertation seeks to contribute to the historical anthropology of colonialism, among other things by applying linguistic anthropological understandings of textual reflexivity and the text-context relationship to the study of a native-language missionary literature. It is also intended as a case study of religious translation in colonial contexts with implications for the study of translation in general, especially the need to broaden the field of inquiry by including issues such as performance and the selection and definition of the target language, and by revising common assumptions regarding the nature and purposes of translation.