Sin and Confession in Colonial Peru: Spanish-Quechua Penitential Texts, 1560-1650.
Rivera-Pagan, Luis N.
Sin and Confession in Colonial Peru: Spanish-Quechua Penitential
Texts, 1560-1650.
By Regina Harrison. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2014. Pp. xvi,
310. $60; paperback $29.95.
Sin and Confession in Colonial Peru is an important contribution to
missions history and also to a critical theological, linguistic, and
theoretical reflection on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish
missionary endeavors among Andean indigenous communities. The book is
structured around the Roman Catholic sacrament of confession and
penitence. Harrison provides a superb analysis of the discussion and
debate regarding whether the process of conversion of autochthonous
communities should have taken place by means of the European
missionaries mastering the native languages, in this case Quechua, or by
imposing the Spanish language upon the conquered nations. The author
describes in detail the strenuous task, on the part of the priests,
religious orders, and preachers, to master the native languages and to
translate catechisms, sermons, and confessionaries into Quechua, also
Aymara.
The central chapters of the book deal, first, with the usefulness
of the sacrament of confession to gather information about possible
clandestine preservations of the native religiosities, considered by the
Iberian Catholic church as idolatry and apostasy, as well as a devilish
invention. The confessionary also enabled the strict policing of the
sexual conduct of the various indigenous communities. Finally, a couple
of substantive chapters address the implementation of confession and
penitence, steered by the overall project of imposing Western cultural
and economic conceptual perspectives on the Andean autochthonous
peoples. The confessionary became an instrument of colonial
transculturation.
Harrison also discusses two issues central to the scholarly studies
of the Spanish colonization and Christianization of Latin America. The
first is the attempt by Bartolome de las Casas to use the sacrament of
confession as an instrument to compel the Spaniards, conquistadores, and
colonizers to admit that their actions violated the natural rights of
the natives, as well as God's commandments, and constituted mortal
sins, and that the only way to receive divine forgiveness and avoid
eternal condemnation was to restore to the indigenous communities their
lands, confiscated wealth, and sovereignty. Restitution, therefore, as
an essential element of the sacrament of confession, was thus to be
transformed into an instrument of liberation of the native nations.
Second, the author conveys very insightful observations about the
peculiar book of Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala El primer nueva coranica y
buen gobierno (1615), which was an ambitious (and ambiguous!) attempt to
reshape the sacrament of confession so that it valued and preserved the
Quechua language and culture.
This book should be required reading, especially in times such as
ours, when indigenous communities have, for the first time in history,
become important protagonists in Latin American national politics,
including in the Andes.
DOI: 10.1177/2396939316657938
Reviewed by: Luis N. Rivera-Pagan, Princeton Theological Seminary,
Princeton, NJ, USA
Author biography
Luis N. Rivera-Pagan is Henry Winters Luce Professor in Ecumenics
Emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary.
