From the time of the extirpators on, religion was the salient
element or institution by which indigenous peoples were
judged in relation to their Christian or European conquer-
ors. Religion, in short, became the principal index for defin-
ing the cultural and social differences separating two now ad-
jacent populations. Such religious criteria helped shape as
well the unfortunate stereotypes applied to Amazonian peo-
ples and cultures.
NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRAVEL AND EXPEDITIONARY LIT-
ERATURE. The interval between the seventeenth-century
campaigns against idolatry and the early-nineteenth-century
independence period was marked by an almost complete ab-
sence of religious studies. In Europe itself the accounts of
Garcilaso de Vega, de Léry, and others provided the raw ma-
terials from which eighteenth-century philosophers crafted
their highly romanticized image of the American Indian.
While Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and others
looked to the Tupinambá as a model for the “noble savage,”
other French philosophers held up Inca religion as an exam-
ple of what an enlightened monarchy and nonpapal deist re-
ligion could look like. Although far removed from South
America itself, these writings continued to influence the
study of South American religions for many future genera-
tions.
With their independence from Spain in the early nine-
teenth century, the new South American republics became
once again available to the travelers, adventurers, natural his-
torians, and scientists who could provide firsthand observa-
tions. Whereas earlier colonial observers had approached the
study of religion through the political and theological lens
of empire and conversion, these nineteenth-century travelers
used the new languages of science and evolutionary progress
to measure the Indians’ status with respect to contemporary
European cultural and historical achievements. While none
of these travelogues and natural histories was intended as a
study of indigenous religion per se, many of them include
reports on religious custom. Among the most important of
these are the travel accounts of Ephraim George Squier
(1877), Charles Wiener (1880), Friedrich Hassaurek (1867),
and James Orton (1876) for the Andean highlands and Jo-
hann Baptist von Spix and Carl von Martius (1824), Henri
Coudreau (1880–1900), Alcides d’Orbigny (1854), and
General Couto de Magalha ̃es (1876) for the Amazonian low-
lands. Such descriptions were augmented, especially in the
Amazon, by detailed and often highly informative accounts
of “pagan” practices written by missionary ethnographers
such as José Cardus (1886) in Bolivia and W. H. Brett
(1852) in British Guiana (now Guyana).
This nineteenth-century literature tended to romanti-
cize the Indians and their religions through exaggerated ac-
counts of practices such as head-hunting, cannibalism, blood
sacrifice, and ritual drinking. In these “descriptions” of reli-
gion emphasis is placed on the exotic, wild, and uncivilized
aspects of the Indians’ religious practices—and on the narra-
tor’s bravery and fortitude in searching them out. Such ro-
manticizing and exoticizing, however, tended to occur un-
evenly. Thus whereas religions of the Amazon Basin were
subject to the most exotic and picturesque stereotypes of
what a tropical primitive should be, the less-remote Andean
Indians were described primarily in terms of their degenera-
tion from the glories of a lost Inca religion that was consid-
ered to be more enlightened or “pure.”
EARLY- TO MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY STUDIES. The twen-
tieth century ushered in new forms of scientific inquiry and
scholarly ideals. Departing from the narrative, subjective
styles of the chroniclers, travelers, and natural historians,
modern writers sought to describe indigenous religion inde-
pendently of any personal, cultural, or historical biases about
it; subjectivity was to be subsumed to a new ideal of relativ-
ism and objectivity. These writers conform to two general
yet interrelated disciplinary fields: (1) the anthropologists
and historians of religion, who use a comparative and typo-
logical framework to examine the universal, phenomenologi-
cal bases of religious belief, and (2) the area specialists, or
Americanists, who are interested in defining the specificity
and social cultural evolution of religions in the Americas.
The first group included such early scholars of lowland
religions as Paul Ehrenreich (1905), Max Schmidt (1905),
and Adolf E. Jensen (who later founded the Frankfurt ethno-
graphic school, home to such important modern scholars of
South American religions as Otto Zerries and Karin His-
sink). Their comparativist theories proved an impetus for the
later field studies of Martin Gusinde (1931–1937) in Tierra
del Fuego, William Farabee (1915–1922), and Günter Tess-
mann (1928–1930) in the Northwest Amazon, Konrad T.
Preuss (1920–1930) in both highland and lowland Colom-
bia, and Theodor Koch-Grünberg (1900–1930) in the Ori-
noco and in Northwest Brazil. These field-workers wrote de-
tailed general accounts of lowland or Amazonian religions
and placed special emphasis on the analysis of iconography,
mythology, and animism.
Studies of highland religion during this early-twentieth-
century period tended to focus almost exclusively on antiqui-
ties. The most important of these studies are the linguistic
treatises of E. W. Middendorf (1890–1892) and J. J. von
Tschudi (1891) and the archaeological surveys of Max Uhle
and Alfons Stubel (1892). Both Incaic and contemporary
Andean materials, however, were included in the broad sur-
veys done by the scholars Adolf Bastian (1878–1889) and
Gustav Brühl (1857–1887), who were interested in compar-
ing the religions and languages of North, South, and Central
America to establish a theory of cultural unity.
The Americanists’ interdisciplinary studies of indige-
nous religion drew on the early twentieth-century German
studies and on at least three other sources as well. The first
was the fieldwork during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s by
European ethnologists such as Alfred Métraux, Paul Rivet,
and Herbert Baldus as well as by American anthropologists
from the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology. Be-
yond describing the general social organization, religion, rit-8594 SOUTH AMERICAN INDIAN RELIGIONS: HISTORY OF STUDY