This issue of Hispanic American Historical Review examines the interactions between Andean peoples and various elite groups — Spanish colonial administrators, postindependence national elites, twentieth-century scholars and researchers — seeking to understand and “see” those peoples. The essays consider the methods and sources those elites employed and the motives with which they did so.
Jeremy Ravi Mumford poses an intriguing methodological question: can anthropologists and historians use colonial-period court cases to recover indigenous legal concepts and practices rooted in the preconquest period? Examining two such cases, he finds that what tends to determine their utility for present-day ethnohistorians is the degree to which Spanish interests, private or public, were affected by the case’s outcome. In the first case, indigenous communities went to court over the question of who should provide the labor to maintain the system of roads and inns (tambos) used by travelers through Peru. In the...
