Contested Territory: Mapping Peru in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

by Heidi V. Scott

Landscape is never static, but changes continuously when seen in relation to human occupation, movement, labor, and discourse. Contested Territory explores the ways in which Peru's early colonial landscapes were experienced and portrayed, especially by the Spanish conquerors but also by their conquered subjects. It focuses on the role played by indigenous groups in shaping the Spanish experiences of landscapes, the diverse geographical images of Peru and ways in which these were constructed and contested, and what this can tell us about the nature of colonial relations in post-conquest Peru. This exceptional study, which draws from archival records and sources such as cartographies, offers a richly nuanced view of the complexity of colonial relations. It will be read with appreciation by those interested in Spanish history, geography, and colonialism.

Genres: History

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

July 19-20, 2016, rated 4 stars

This was one of the first books I read in Colonial Latin America history when I began graduate school, and now that I have a context and a (slight!) understanding of the field, it really grew on me during the second reading. What Heidi Scott argues in this work, particularly pertaining to "imaginative geography" really is worth pondering. Parts of her work align well with Steve Stern's - both see landscape and colonialism as a negotiated process by both the Spanish and the indigenous peoples.


October 1-9, 2011 - rated 3 stars (book review written for class seminar)

For her book, Contested Territory, Human Geographer Heidi V. Scott mined Spanish archives in order to re-examine the story of Peru’s colonization through a new and interesting lens. She began by restoring Peru’s borders to their sixteenth century demarcations which originally included the Amazonian rainforest as well as the Andean mountains. Within this added dimension of disparate climes, Scott explored how Peru’s geography affected the process of colonization, and how the European colonizers and the Peruvian natives each used this treacherous landscape as a method for agency in a shifting society. Ultimately, it is Scott’s multi-faceted interpretation of landscape that makes this monograph a valuable read.

In the first chapter, Scott oriented her readers to the historical theories she used to underpin the work as well as introduced the primary and secondary source materials. She drew heavily on post-colonial theorists and subaltern studies, especially the work of Edward Said, Timothy Mitchell, and Matthew Restall. After the first chapter, the overt emphasis on theory fades; but it is clear from the questions that the author posed and the chapter titles she assigned that these ideas serve as the frame for her narrative.

As primary records for Peru are scarce, Scott did not attempt to locate new materials, but instead focused on two major bodies of sources; the Relaciones Geográficas and the Relaciones de Servicios (henceforth referred to as “RGs” and “RSs” respectively). The RGs were answers to a survey conducted by the Spanish Council of the Indies in 1586 in an effort to better understand the Latin American colonies. The responses received were uneven as many of the corregidores failed to reply, and others were new to the country or simply ignorant of their territories. The RSs are documents written by the conquistadores in an attempt to persuade the Spanish royalty to award them money and titles for their service to the crown. These documents emphasize the pain, starvation, and hunger the conquistadores endured during the explorative period in their quests to expand and enrich Spain. Here especially, Scott infused the work of Latin Americanist Beatriz Pastor Bodmer and her entwined concepts of “demythification” and the “discourse of failure.”

Bodmer examined documents related to the discovery of the New World, starting with the early and wildly popular speculative travel narratives, through to the RSs written by the jaded conquistadores. She noted how the tone and rhetoric gradually changed as the knowledge of and experience in the New World increased. Early travel narratives, such as that of Sir John Mandeville, were swathed in the mythology of exotic otherness, while some focused on more material gains – cities with streets paved with gold and fountains which restored youth – among other riches. Bodmer asserted that the next stage was the vainglorious language of conquest where the Conquistadores boasted of their domination and subjugation of the native peoples. However, once the conquistadores realized that there were no easily available riches to ship back to Spain, the tone of their language in the narratives shifted and they emphasized the value of their suffering instead of the triumphs of conquest. These “discourses of failure,” argued that pain was equivalent to material gain and that they should be compensated and honored accordingly. Bodmer stated that in these new discourses of failure “the enemy [was] no longer the native but the environment,” and the realization that people are powerless when they cannot meet their most basic needs of food and shelter. Scott seized this idea in particular to advance her argument that the landscape was a determinant factor of colonization.

Throughout the work, Scott also contended with the dual ideas of negotiation and “resistance” (her quotes). Central to this argument is her assertion that neither the European colonizers nor the Peruvian natives were fused collectives who acted in scripted unison; but rather these were collections of individuals who made decisions that served their own best interests. While Scott utilized the term “resistance,” she felt that it is misleading, and that both native and European actions which seem to run counter to expectations for their subset should be viewed as part of the process of negotiation rather than subversion.

A poignant example of a counterintuitive native decision occurred when priests scoured the rugged terrain of Huarochirí on a mission to find and destroy all native huacas. In the course of one search, Father Fabián de Ayala discovered that native bodies had been exhumed from Christian cemeteries and reburied in unsanctified, concealed locations. The bodies were so well hidden, in fact, that the priest acknowledged that “without native assistance, they would never have been found.” Clearly, there were some natives who, for reasons of their own, found it advantageous to assist Europeans in destroying what others in their group had worked so hard to protect. Scott also uncovered situations where Europeans disregarded the Catholic Spanish agenda because a blind eye seemed to be the most effective tactic for keeping peace and buying good will.
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For Scott, landscape is an entangled concept which she used as the connective tissue to examine the colonial experience from the perspectives of both the colonizers and the colonized. Like Antonello Gerbí, she conceived of ‘Peru as a pathway’ which defined the relationship of its inhabitants with the land. One distinct advantage of using landscape as an explorative device is that it allowed Scott to develop an argument showing how natives used their physical surroundings in response to the European invasion. This information filled in part, although not wholly, the void left from the absence of textual sources. To access what information she could, Scott considered landscape from multiple perspectives.

She first contemplated landscape from the conventional perspective of visible topography and examined how these physical features influenced the Spaniards’ perceptions of the New World. Scott argued that when Europeans first arrived, they perceived the land as inviting because of the ways that the natives had altered the landscape. After the natives died from European-introduced diseases, the land went unworked and reverted to its wild state. The Spaniards then saw the same territory as hostile and foreign.

Landscape is an item to be physically owned, but also mentally dominated. Upon their arrival, the Europeans renamed and repurposed land features and imposed their own spatial distinctions in an attempt to eradicate the territory of the extant native culture. They understood the power of names, symbolism, and usage. Soon after they established a permanent presence, the natives were removed from their own communities and relocated to the European designed and organized reducciones, and many priests arrived with the intention of destroying all native religious items. With few physical reminders of their past, the Europeans believed that the natives would be more amenable to adopting Christianity and the work system. Theoretically, destroying religious items was possible when it involved mere objects. The difficulty arose when the natives’ religious items were mountains, rivers, and other geographical features. Priests found answers from the first Christians who repurposed pagan holy sites and religious holidays as their own. Across Peru, European priests planted crosses on immutable native holy sites reconstituting the landscape as Christian territory.

Scott then expanded her definition of landscape to include the realm of “imaginative geography,” a concept she borrowed from Said. Using Said’s concept, she argued how landscape features were used to establish mental boundaries between the natives and the Europeans and to create distinctions between natives. There were our Indians and wild Indians (my emphasis). Our Indians lived in the European-conceived reducciones, agreed to live under at least the guise of Christianity, and to work in the mita system. They lived in flat areas and were connected to the Europeans, especially the priests, by moderately accessible pathways. Wild Indians maintained their cultural and religious distinctions by fleeing to the remote mountainous sections of the territory, where they were inaccessible to civilizing influences. Here, the natives’ character was defined by the physical topography where they resided, which facilitated distinctions in the European’s mental landscape.
Scott was also willing to conceive of landscape as a three dimensional concept. In her discussion of the Spaniards combating native resistance through the literal unearthing and destruction of huacas and other religious artifacts, Scott envisaged landscape as “‘a vertical third dimension’ of the subterranean.” She clarified this thought in a footnote to make certain that the reader understands that she “use[d] the term to evoke a particular mode of physical (my emphasis) engagement with the landscape rather than a form of spatial imagination: no longer confined to the surface, the extirpators’ struggles were enacted below ground, by means of excavation.” This vertical landscape extended skyward as well. Where the Europeans entrenched as a means to destroy the native culture, Scott argued that the natives instead scaled the treacherous topography in order to evade colonizers and missionaries. This tactic also plays into Scott’s use of the discourse of failure and how demoralizing the Spanish found the terrain. After two years of attempting to infiltrate the mountains and bring the natives back to the reducciones and the Christian God, the Jesuits found themselves unable to conquer the wilderness and they recorded their sufferings as evidence of their religious devotion.

As one would expect in the work of a geographer, Scott’s narrative incorporates maps as well as the story of the physical and political process of cartography during the colonial period. Although she has come under criticism from one reviewer for underutilizing maps, her decision to approach landscape from a more theoretical perspective has allowed her to create a unique narrative that more traditional scholars may be unable to fully appreciate. Furthermore, Scott did use maps as an orthodox episteme in her attempt to break down the concept of landscape.

In a particularly vivid section, Scott used the RG of Diego Dávila Briceño who was an exceptional character in Peru’s colonial history. At the time of the survey, Dávila had served as a corregidor for at least thirteen years which was an unusually lengthy term as most corregidores were unable or unwilling to maintain their positions for any considerable period in the fledgling colony. Dávila responded to his questionnaire with an extraordinarily high level of detail. He included his own map of Huarochirí, where he highlighted the features most important to him; namely, the former native sites that he had helped reconstitute as European ones. Scott argued that this map was Dávila’s attempt to achieve fixity in Peru’s shifting landscape.

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A concise 166 page work, Scott’s monograph is the eighth edition to Notre Dame Press’ History, Languages, and Cultures of the Spanish and Portuguese Worlds series, whose aim is to “promote scholarship in studies on Iberian cultures and contacts from the pre-modern and early modern periods.” It is undoubtedly a scholar’s work aimed with an academic audience in mind and, despite its reworking, bears the distinctive markers of having been born from a dissertation. It includes a much-appreciated glossary of Spanish colonial terms, as well as less welcomed endnotes, which are obtrusive to navigate with the frequency that Scott’s work demands. Most critically, the work suffers from a lack of overarching structure. Many of the chapters are suitable as standalone essays, which makes for strong chapters, but weakens the work’s overall cohesiveness. For a work that rests so heavily on the use of linguistic terminology, it is somewhat surprising that Scott seemed so willing to play fast and loose with the terminology she employed for the Peruvian natives. Throughout the text she interchanged terms such as “Amerindian,” “Indian,” and “natives” with, by her own admission, no other consideration than to dispel textual boredom. All of these terms carry modern political implications, and it would behoove Scott in future works to consider her terms carefully. Arguably, the oddest flaw of the work is that the title fails to encapsulate the essence of the author’s stated intentions. From this particular fault, however, Scott should be exonerated as this was a marketing decision on the part of the press and not an area in which she could effectively exert control.

The methodology Scott employed has double-edged implications. On one hand, her use of landscape provided an entirely new perspective for interpretation; however, it remains to be seen which academics will embrace it because it does not belong to any single field of study. Scott incorporated elements of geography, and environmental and Latin American histories, but these scholars will find expected criterion fundamental to their fields missing. Especially glaring is the lack of any discussion of Peruvian silver mining from which Spain derived most of its colonial wealth – wealth they obtained through the violent subjugation of the Peruvian natives through the destruction of their society. The natives who mined Spain’s wealth were the ones confined to the reducciones, and while she discussed that the natives regularly ran away to live in the mountains, she never elaborated as to why these runaways found a tenuous and lonely existence eeked out in mountainous terrain to be preferable to remaining on the reducciones with their people.

This criticism should not detract from what Scott has achieved in Contested Territory. She employed a bold strategy in blending maps with traditional sources and interpreting this information using post-modernist theoretical constructs to yield a new and interesting perspective. She created an important work and carved a niche for herself in the new and growing field of interdisciplinary studies. Her techniques are certainly worth replicating both in her own future works as well as by other historians who are seeking to bring a stimulating approach to their projects.