Description
Book SynopsisIn Search of an Inca examines how people in the Andean region have invoked the Incas to question and rethink colonialism and injustice, from the time of the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century until the late twentieth century. It stresses the recurrence of the 'Andean Utopia', that is, the idealization of the pre-colonial past as an era of harmony, justice, and prosperity and the foundation for political and social agendas for the future. In this award-winning work, Alberto Flores Galindo highlights how different groups imagined the pre-Andean world as a model for a new society. These included those conquered by the Spanish in the sixteenth century but also rebels in the colonial and modern era and a heterogeneous group of intellectuals and dissenters. This sweeping and accessible history of the Andes over the last five hundred years offers important reflections on and grounds for comparison of memory, utopianism, and resistance.
Trade Review'Flores Galindo, in his now-classic In Search of an Inca, traces the utopian myth that has persisted in many forms in the Andean region down to the present, inspiring uprisings, prophecies, sects, and local rituals … [The book] follows the underground path of myth and memory and the ethnic tensions that have preoccupied Peru's greatest thinkers. It is an absorbing story that needed to be told.' Jean Franco, Columbia University
'Alberto Flores Galindo was Peru's most creative historian in the post-1960s era. This book brilliantly interprets the yearnings for an Inca past that inspired struggles to reinvent Peru's present and future.' Steve J. Stern, Alberto Flores Galindo Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Table of ContentsEditors' introduction; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Europe and the land of the Incas: the Andean utopia; 2. Communities and doctrines: the struggle for souls (central Andes, 1608–66); 3. The spark and the fire: Juan Santos Atahualpa; 4. The Tupac Amaru Revolution and the Andean people; 5. Govern the world, disrupt the world; 6. Soldiers and montoneros; 7. A republic without citizens; 8. The utopian horizon; 9. The boiling point; 10. The silent war; 11. Epilogue: dreams and nightmares.
