In Sin and Confession in Colonial Peru, Regina Harrison examines how confession was linguistically enacted in the colonial Andes. By analyzing language adaptations in confession manuals composed in Spanish and Quechua, and other similar texts, Harrison reveals an exchange between Andean and Spanish concepts of sin and sexuality, expanding our understanding of how sex and gender worked in the colonial Iberian worlds. Miscommunication was rampant; Andeans understood theft, sexual sin, and idol worship as most egregious during the colonial period, while clerics lamented the indigenous misconceptions of key religious concepts such as resurrection. Harrison argues that Catholic missionaries’ translations proved their understanding and knowledge of Andean rituals, sacred objects, and sexual practices, and even shared Spanish-indigenous cultural categories of sin such as homicide and adultery. Building on previous work by Sabine MacCormack and Gabriela Ramos, Harrison demonstrates how the Spanish clerics imposed words like anima to mean soul, obliterating Andean conceptions of noncorporeal essences. Harrison's analysis of specific questions in confession manuals demonstrates how clerics worked to eradicate the Andean beliefs that desire was procreative and celebratory, and specifically targeted Andean kinship practices, erotic language, and sex outside of Christian heterosexual marriage. In the clerical monitoring of desire and consciousness, Harrison finds that priests were most alarmed by acts of sodomy and bestiality and sought to impose a Catholic standard of virginity and marriage on Andean communities. Here she further encourages Andeanists to follow the work of Michael Horswell and Mary Weismantel, among others, to explore the realms of sexuality and sex practices before and after the Spanish.
Harrison expertly traces the concepts of restitution and sin from European Christianity to the colonial Andes. Clerical exhortations for Christian colonizers to examine their conscience, confess their sins, and restore to indigenous communities what the Spaniards gained in conquest were reflected in wills and religious texts. The evangelization effort in the later sixteenth century increasingly threatened punishment for incomplete confessions but Harrison argues that the linguistic evidence proves that the Spanish evangelical enterprise incorporated Andeans into Catholicism, further underlining the work of Kenneth Mills, John Charles, and Irene Silverblatt. Harrison demonstrates how Catholic confession manuals incorporated Andean forms of cleansing and penance, adopting Quechua words for God.
In the last two chapters, Harrison extends her discussion of sin to the marketplace. Spanish colonizers perceived that Andeans sinned when they did not engage in European practices of monetary exchange but continued to barter goods and to employ kinship networks for reciprocal exchange. In particular, Spanish officials and clerics expressed concern that indigenous leaders did not pay wages to community members or that indigenous laborers in the mines illegally stole and sold silver ore. Harrison deepens our knowledge of Andean market adaptations to show that colonial Andeans adapted Quechua concepts such as manu to mean the relationship between a creditor and a debtor and employed Quechua terms for new colonial concepts such as wholesaler, vendor, and price-fixing. Harrison demonstrates that Andeans continued a logic of reciprocity (as expressed in the Quechua term maña) and shows that Catholic clerics were concerned with mortal sins committed by both Andeans and Spanish in the labor marketplace, including trafficking in stolen goods.
The last section, however, does not explicitly reveal the early modern connection between commercialization and sexuality other than both being labeled as sinful. The fine grain of Harrison's masterful ethnohistorical work obscures an argument regarding the transformation of colonization in the Andes or the relationship between sexual and commercial exchange. In the conclusion, Harrison examines wills and testaments to reveal how restitution in confession, the participation of indigenous scribes, and the emphasis on land transfer to the subsequent generation reveals that colonial Andeans were integrated and converted into colonial Catholic society but continued “Andean traditional landholding practices” (236). Colonial exchange resulted in some change and some continuity. Specialists in the Andes will revel in Harrison's dextrous methodology, nevertheless, as she weaves together ethnography, history, and a close textual analysis of literary studies to produce a fascinating study of colonial consciousness.
