☆Contested Territory:Mapping Peru in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

 

Heidi V. Scott

☆Contested Territory:Mapping Peru in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries(NOTRE DAME PRESS 2009)

 

 

 

Karl H. Offen, Reviews, Journal of Historical Geography 37 (2011) 132-133

 

Text-based studies of landscape and colonialism tend to privilege discursive approaches. In Contested Territory, Heidi V. Scott seeks to rematerialize colonial landscape studies by focusing on corporeal encounters, nonrepresentational practices, non-human agency, and the agency of non-Europeans. By establishing a dialog between archives and social theory to discuss the production of geographic knowledge during the creation of the viceroyalty of Peru, Scott reminds us that early modern colonial practices are inherently distinct from those of the Enlightenment, and that they deserve greater attention in studies of European expansion in
general and colonialism in particular.

Scott is lecturer at the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University. Her book began as a dissertation project at the University of Cambridge under the guidance of Sarah Radcliffe and James Duncan. Her study relies on archival materials housed in Peru, Bolivia, and Spain, but also a wealth of rare Spanish imprints. The book is relatively short, contains five substantive chapters, a useful glossary, and ten maps, nine of which are excellent topographic or thematic maps drawn by the author. The tenth is a reproduction of Dávila Briceño’s 1586 map of Yauyos province: it is unfortunate that this stunning map was not a little sharper.

The purpose of the book is to show that landscape experiences, the production of geographic knowledge, and colonial ambitions are not only interrelated with one another, but are ever varying, negotiated, and mediated by embodied practices, biophysical conditions, and non-European agency. Despite the book’s title, Scott’s organizing concept is landscape, conceptualized ‘as animated rather than static, as process rather than as product, and as embodied experience rather than as disembodied vision’ (p. 7). By taking this approach, Scott shows that there can be no single ‘colonial vision’ of Andean landscapes, as male authors encountered,
described, and dealt with their environments and social relations in unique ways and for specific purposes.

Each chapter explores two or three nuanced case studies to demonstrate how corporeal encounters with biophysical and social landscapes played out. In chapter two, for example, Scott compares narratives that preceded and followed the conquest of the Inca empire. Pre-conquest narratives of eternal suffering and starvation at the hands of a forbidding environment are ubiquitous in early Spanish relacciones de servicios (royal service narratives). It is only after indigenous roads, houses, and foods facilitated Spanish mobility that the Spaniards had time to think beyond daily struggle. only then was the ‘purposeful linearity’ (p. 23) of the conquest narrative firmly established. In this sense, a physical environment constrained but a humanized landscape enabled Spanish spatial practices and the narratives about them.

The sixteenth-century questionnaires and their replies known as the Relacciones Geográficas are used in another chapter to problematize the notion of resistance. only 15 regional officials (corregidores) filled out the surveys in Peru, compared to 166 in Mexico. This low number, Scott argues, reflects the fact that Spanish officials were unable fully to describe the landscapes under their jurisdictions. on the one hand, they were anxious to describe the Hispanized and Christian nature of landscape, but on the other native mobility and concealment of sacred geographies rendered the landscape unintelligible to outsiders. Non-compliance by both Spanish officials and native peoples were, thus, separate but complementary forms of resistance. In another example, Scott describes the spatial struggle between two neighboring priests to delineate parish boundaries in the face of Andean migration in the province ofHuarochirí. Here Scott excels at showing how movement through a rugged landscape defined the spatial conceptions of the two litigants. A medieval view of space that combined corporeal encounter, relativemobility (which was a function of native assistance), and physical distances constituted landscape descriptions and experiences. In other words, a Cartesianor cartographicway of knowingor representing spacewas still quite foreign to most indigenous and Spanish peoples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The two final chapters cover the Amazonian frontier and its relationship to the Andean highlands. one compelling case study follows the repeated petitions to the Council of Indies by the maestre de campo, Juan Recio de León, after his foray into today’s Bolivian Amazon. After his request for favorwas rejected by viceroyal officials, Recio de León traveled to Spain where he ‘continuously reworked [his] portrayals of Amazonia’ (p. 110) to suit official concerns and needs. Scott uses Recio de León’s varied geographic accounts over a five-year period to discuss the opportunistic ways that colonial discourses are created and, how, following Latour’s notion of a center of calculation, the production of geographic knowledge was often a ‘collective process’ (p. 130) informed by the center’s desires. To cite any given petition by Recio de León, or by extension any single colonial vision of landscape, would have missed this important point.

Drawing on the theoretical positions of numerous scholars ranging from Andrew Sluyter and Gillian Rose to José Rabasa and Beatriz Pastor Bodmer, among others, Scott has produced a sophisticated and well-written empirical study of the relationship between landscape and colonialism. Above all she highlights the ways colonizers experienced, mediated, and negotiated the landscape, and thus the role of nonrepresentational spatial practices in constituting colonialism and the larger production of geographic knowledge in the viceroyalty of Peru.