Book Reviews

Charles, John (2010) Allies at Odds: The Andean Church and Its Indigenous Agents,
1583–1671, University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, NM), xi + 283 pp. $27.95
pbk.

Following the Spanish Conquest the native population of Andean South America was
organised in self-governing townships (cabildos de indios) and subjected to taxation
and forced evangelisation. The purpose of this book is to throw light on how the
process of evangelisation in the early colonial period was assisted, and to a considerable
extent formed, by Indians literate in the Spanish language: the so-called indios ladinos.
They largely derived from the Indian nobility, a stratum of the native population
that depended on the colonial power for the maintenance of their privileged position.
Although they were excluded from the priesthood, the important role that they played
as intermediaries and assistants to the clergy has largely been overlooked. The author
argues that literacy reshaped colonial distributions of power. The indios ladinos were
often in position to take advantage of the overlap of royal and ecclesiastical government
inherent to the Spanish colonial system and thwarted to some extent the Church’s
© 2013 The Authors. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2013 Society for Latin American Studies
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efforts to evangelise on its own terms. On the other hand, there was no uniform Indian
position on what it meant to be Christian. Differing Andean conceptions of Christianity
rarely aligned themselves along the division between Spaniards and Indians.
This book is a historical study drawing mainly on archival sources relating to the
highland parishes of the Lima archdiocese in Peru. Its two first chapters tell the story
about how literacy and Christianity were introduced to the Indian population. From the
start missionary priests adopted the Quechua language of Cuzco as their main tool for
communication and evangelisation, even though this language was poorly understood
in locations far from the Inca capital. This meant that the Indian elite in many regions,
including that studied here, had to develop literate capabilities in two essentially foreign
languages. Nonetheless, Cuzcoan Quechua was never much cultivated as a written
medium outside purely religious contexts, and the archived documents from the early
colonial period – including those authored by literate Indians – are almost exclusively
in Spanish. While secular authorities always favoured the use of Spanish, the literate
Indian elite had, as privileged intermediaries, little desire to propagate the knowledge
and use of Spanish among the general Indian population. They may, however, have
played a role in adapting the use of khipus (knotted strings) to religious purposes. In
the third chapter the author discusses the persistent use of this Andean record-keeping
technology well into the seventeenth century. Although little is still known about khipu
coding systems, the author asserts that they were used in the context of confessions (for
keeping track of sins) and speculates that the missionary clergy may have steered this
technology in the direction of representing spoken language.
The last three chapters of the book discuss written complaints about clerical violence,
attitudes towards idolatry that can be deduced from the written sources, and the overall
rhetorical significance of the different documents authored by the literate indios ladinos.
Charles argues that their letters addressing colonial authorities should not simply be
interpreted as those of wronged subordinates seeking redress with the superior powers
of their day; they rather belong in a complex terrain of shifting interests and loyalties in
which these elite Indians often had their own axes to grind as privileged intermediaries.
Generally, the archival sources indicate that native litigants accepted the central place of
Spanish colonial law in the regulation of social conflict; and by doing so, they granted
legitimacy to the legal order that was the source of their rights as well as their oppression.
I have little problem with these arguments of the author and can well assume that
he on a general level is right. However, I do not feel sure that the archival past speaks
as unequivocally on many of these issues as this book suggests. My reading of it left me
with the feeling that it was written over a framework of presuppositions that could have
been made clearer to the reader. The author’s strict historiographic approach tends to
make his account disappointingly thin on the cultural contextualisation of the topics
that he deals with. For example, practices identified as ‘idolatry’ by the Church were
important to many Indians and a recurrent preoccupation of the priests. Despite the
inclusion of a whole chapter dedicated to this phenomenon, the author offers little in
the way of a sociological perspective to explain its significance and endurance. One
can also miss a more comprehensive portrayal of the indios ladinos as a class or social
group. Possibly the reader’s understanding of their motives and agendas could have
become clearer, if the author in addition to the analysed documents had included more
information extracted from ethnographic and ethnohistorical sources.

Jon Schackt
University of Tromsø
© 2013 The Authors. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2013 Society for Latin American Studies
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