Art historian Carolyn Dean’s Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ breathes life into Cuzco’s mid-colonial years through a multiperspectival investigation of Corpus Christi, the Catholic feast in honor of the body of Christ as transubstantiated in the consecrated Host. Writing for an academic and cross-disciplinary readership, Dean studies the ways in which different historical actors understood their own and others’ participation in the public performances of the festival, and how their understandings were being created and developed within pictorial and textual representations of these performances.
Dean emphasizes that while the annual festival in the former Inka capital became a potent expression of Spanish Christian triumph and native Andean subjugation, it was almost never only that. Corpus was a performance in which Indians embodied a range of deliberate and inadvertent roles, from the tightly scripted through the wildly ambivalent to the largely independent and even subversive. It was not as...