Death, conversion, and identity in the Peruvian Andes: Lima and Cuzco, 1532--167

This dissertation studies the process of conversion to Catholicism of the Andean indigenous population through the changes that were brought upon its attitudes toward death. This perspective is a way of understanding the analysis of the cultural transformations that took place in the Peruvian Andes since the European invasion in 1532, until 1670, a time when the colonial order was firmly established. This is a comparative study of two cities of the Peruvian viceroyalty, Lima and Cuzco. Death was the most complex and controversial terrain on which the incorporation of the Andean population to Catholicism took place. Since religious conversion involves a complex set of changes that is not produced in a vacuum, but in contexts that are specific and dynamic, it is within those contexts that the study of conversion is undertaken. Conversion to Christianity was not a free and voluntary act of mere acceptance of a faith and the way of life it called for. In the conditions of Spanish colonial domination, it meant the submission to a totalizing regime, where a number of aspects of public and private life were regulated and penalized to facilitate colonial rule and evangelization. Hence, the incorporation of Andean peoples into colonial Catholicism involved the modification of kinship ties; changes in the location and design of human settlements; the imposition of the Spanish language; the adaptation of European material culture, among other aspects of crucial importance for the formation of colonial society. This dissertation demonstrates that while State and Church agreed on the general directions to be taken on the colonial project, the policies implemented locally diverged due to the different social, political, and cultural settings of each of the cities considered in this study. The dissertation offers a close analysis of the impact that the State and Church policies had on the lives of the inhabitants of Cuzco and Lima, and explains the effects of the Christianization of death among the Andean indigenous population.