10 - Between Excess and Pleasure: The Religious Festivals of the Indigenous People of Jujuy, Seventeenth-Nineteenth Centuries

Summary

Abstract

This chapter studies the religious festivals staged by the indigenous confraternities of colonial Jujuy, in the viceroyalty of Peru. It argues that these festivals help consolidate Spanish rule over these individuals, sustaining that this festival culture helped legitimize the indigenous governors’ authority and popularized a penchant for the excess of food and drink.

Keywords: Jujuy, indigenous confraternities, Feasting, food, alcohol

Introduction

This work analyzes Indigenous religious festivals in the Viceroyalty of Peru. Our hypothesis is that indigenous parishioners engaged in festive spending that enabled colonial legal domination by the State, the Church, and its agents of exploitation because the festivities reinforced the authority of curacas and Indian governors and popularized an overindulgence in drinking and feasting. The case study is Jujuy, a district located in the Peruvian regional space with a dominant indigenous population, like Charcas, Potosí, and La Paz. This geographical context allows us to establish historical comparisons to determine the different types of festivals, the legality and legitimacy of economic exploitation, as well as how these festive performances fell within the framework of colonial rule.

Regarding the historiographical perspective, we consider that festivities favor processes of group revitalization. With respect to the documents that we will use, it is necessary to critique sources before analyzing the religious festivals of the Indigenous people of Jujuy, because, as Jacques Heers puts it, as for identity, resistant, and rebellious behaviors in the festivities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are actually reputed as such in sources by the State and the Church to combat paganism and to continue evangelization with more sober religious practices and devotions. For this reason, the sample was prepared with documents that could be contrasted among themselves. Thus, documents generated by the Crown, the governors and councils, and also, by the ecclesiastical jurisdictions of the bishoprics, the church councils, the local parishes, and the native parishioners were selected, which allowed us to confront the dominant agency with the subaltern agency. For example, when identifying that the cédulas reales (royal decrees) prohibited the festivals, the ecclesiastical tariffs that funded them were enumerated. The denunciations made against doctrinal priests for imposing festivals were compared with inventories of the churches that recognized them, and the complaints by ethnic authorities that the festivals were an excessive economic burden for the community were refuted with records of elections by indigenous authorities for the exercise of stewardships and festivals.