The 47 original articles in these two volumes, organized as a homage to the distinguished Andeanist polymath, Pierre Duviols, offer something for everyone. Duviols’ best-known work is La lutte contre les religions autochtones dans le Pérou colonial (1971), but his bio-bibliography shows nearly 60 works, centering on Andean religion but covering several literary and cultural topics. True to this inspiration, the contributors are drawn from a wide range of countries, fields, and specialities. Twenty-four of the articles are written in French, 20 in Spanish, 2 in English, and 1 in Catalan.
The reader is impressed again by the linguistic ability of French scholars of Latin America: several of the articles in Spanish were written by French men and women. Gary Urton and Deborah Poole are the sole English-language participants; J. V. Murra’s brief discussion of Polo de Ondegardo and the debate over encomienda is in French. As the title indicates, most of the articles treat Mesoamerica and the Andes, but three are about Spain, three others about the Antilles, two on Chile, and one on Brazil. History, literature, anthropology, and cultural studies are the main fields.
Two essays offer fascinating discussions of the poetry of César Vallejo. Roland Forgues, in “El reto de Vallejo—asumirse como totalidad,” tracks the broad development of the tragic poet’s existential anguish along the road from Christian humanism to Marxist materialism. Charles Lancha dissects the heretofore baffling (to me) “España, aparta de mí esta cáliz.” Along the same lines, Georges Baudot builds on Alfonso Reyes’ ideas about the influence of popular culture, and particularly the submerged voices of seventeenth-century black slaves and Indians, on the poetry of Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz. Baudot also brings to light additional evidence of the poet’s acute awareness of her own marginality as a woman in viceregal society.
Two long documents are “La relation de voyage de Roulof Baro chez les indiens cariris du Rio Grande do Norte (Brésil),’’ a 1647 account by a functionary of the Dutch West Indian Company; and the transcript, along with explanatory apparatus by Duviols’ brother, Jean-Paul, of a circa 1774 document found in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, titled “Descripción de la Ciudad de Lima, Capital del Reyno del Perú.” Both will be useful to specialists in those areas.
There is an overview of recent work on the Inquisition in Peru by Teodoro Hampe-Martínez; a brief but deft and suggestive comment on the way color (of clothing, buildings, adornment, and so on) was or was not reported by the first Europeans in America; another on the classical construction of Moctezuma’s portrait by Bernal Díaz; and a third on the “mentalité de l’esclave” in the Spanish Caribbean. Thierry Saignes examines “chamanisme et religion” in the eastern Andes in the mid-eighteenth century; and Rolena Adorno provides yet another informed and elegant discussion, this one on “mestizo culture” in sixteenth-century Peru, and more particularly the interrelated opinions of Guaman Poma de Ayala and the visitador, Cristóbal de Albornoz. Several other contributions are also worthy of praise.
Enfin, we have here a veritable buffet of academic dishes. Most are fresh and pleasing to the taste; others exotic and barely recognizable as proper intellectual nourishment; two or three already stale. But in all it is a tempting feast, nicely presented by Raquel Thiercelin, and a suitably eclectic offering to honor one of the pioneers of Andean studies.
