Religious Studies: A Global View

time: ‘Each religion germinates in the downfall of another. It fights against its

own mother. It wins and rises to its climax, thereupon declining and ceding

the field to a new belief destined to suffer the same fate’ (1985, vol. 1: 318).

Clorinda Matto also criticized the abuse of women and natives by priests. The

social stage of Matto’s fiction is the province, that is, indigenous territory, where

Indians worked for no pay, without protection, and suffering various abuses

at the hands of priests.

The emergence of the study of religions

Two early twentieth-century scholars were prominent in the emergence of the

study of religion in Peru: José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) and Julio C.

Tello (1880–1947). Mariátegui’s work (1928, 1970, 1979) consists of essays

written in the heat of the militancy and the revolutionary thought that took

shape in Latin America during the first decades of the twentieth century. Writing

from an unorthodox Marxist perspective, Mariátegui was the first Peruvian

to analyze the ‘indigenous world,’ emphasizing the social place of religion in

contemporary, Andean Peruvian culture. Tello was interested in explaining the

shape of ancient divinities, traces of which still existed. Peruvian archaeology

begins with his investigations. His conclusions rest on empirical information—

iconography in ceramic ware and architecture—as well as on chronicles,

travelers’ histories, myths and legends. His key work (1923) studies Wiracocha,

one of the most important divinities of ancient Peru.

The development of the study of religions

Peruvian anthropology took an important step in the late 1940s, with the

founding of the Instituto de Etnología y Arqueología de la Universidad de San

Marcos en Lima. The resulting ethnohistorical studies made excellent use of

colonial chronicles. Luis Valcárcel (1965) discussed the impact of Catholicism

on indigenous cultures. He argued (1964, vol. 2) that, unable to resist the

religion of the colonizers, the indigenous peoples feigned acceptance while

continuing to adhere to the old gods. The result was the incorporation of

indigenous elements into Catholic worship, with Christianity in the end merely

superimposed on the ancient religion. John Rowe (1946) studied post-conquest

Inca culture and presented a general vision of ‘Andean religion’. George Kubler

(1946) studied religion in the colonial era, concluding that the conversion of

indigenous peoples to Catholicism was an established fact by 1660.

In the 1950s, the Department of Anthropology at the Universidad del Cusco

was founded. Two works stand out in this decade: Harry Tschopik (1957)

wrote a rich ethnography of the magical practices among the Aymaras of the

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ENGLER, MOLINA, DE LA TORRE, RIVERA AND MARCOS