Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550-1650 (History, Languages and Cultures of the Spanish and Portuguese Worlds) Book

"Pastoral Quechua is an entryway into the world of colonial Quechua culture through language, showing how Spanish missionaries did not merely translate Christianity into the Inka language, but built up new and complex syntheses of Inka and Spanish worlds. A foundational work, it opens up new and untouched ways of understanding the impact of European colonialism in the Americas, making a singular contribution to colonial history, to historical linguistics, and to the anthropology of colonialism." ----Bruce Mannheim, University of Michigan "By building seamlessly upward from the fine filigree of grammar to daring revisions of history, Durston unveils a fateful chapter in the formation of Andean culture. Pastoral Quechua stands alongside Johannes Fabian's work on Swahili, Vicente Rafael's on Tagalog, and Serge Gruzinski's on Nahuatl as a cardinal study of how early-modern language struggles fatefully shaped speech, literacy, and authority among non-European peoples." ----Frank Salomon, John V. Murra Professor of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison "Pastoral Quechua is a wonderful volume that will be of interest to a broad range of scholars including historians, linguists, and anthropologists, as well as scholars in all fields interested in Peru. The study focuses on the practice of translation, as the author states, but it is much more than that. It is a meticulously researched work that provides careful linguistic analysis conceptualized within a historical study of Catholic evangelization in colonial Peru." ----Thomas B. F. Cummins, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art, Harvard University Pastoral Quechua tells the story of how the Catholic church in post-conquest Peru attempted to "incarnate" Christianity in Quechua, the principal language family of the former Inca empire. These efforts resulted in the development and imposition of an official, standardized form of Quechua and of an extensive catechetical, liturgical, and devotional literature for use in parishes throughout the Andes. The book explores this Quechua-language Christian literature from historical, linguistic, and textual angles to reveal missionary translation as a highly strategic and contested activity on the front lines of Spanish colonialism in the Andes.Read More