Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World

VISION, RACE, AND MODERNITY

EDITORS

Sherry B. Ortner, Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley

A LIST OF TITLES

IN THIS SERIES APPEARS

AT THE BACK OF

THE BOOK

PRINCETON STUDIES IN

CULTURE / POWER / HISTORY

VISION, RACE,

AND MODERNITY

A VISUAL ECONOMY OF THE

ANDEAN IMAGE WORLD

Deborah Poole

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1997 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Poole, Deborah, 1952-

Vision, race, and modernity : a visual economy of the Andean

image world / Deborah Poole.

p. cm. — (Princeton studies in culture/power/history)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 0-691-00646-6 (CL : acid-free paper). —

ISBN 0-691-00645-8 (PB : acid-free paper)

1. Visual anthropology—Andes Region. 2. Photography in ethnology—

Andes Region—History. 3. Indians of South America—Andes Region—

Pictorial works—History. 4. Race—Pictorial works—History.

I. Title. II. Series.

GN347.P66 1997

305.8’0098’0222—dc21 96-45561

eISBN: 978-0-691-23464-9

R0

For Chacho

Contents

List of Illustrations  ix

Acknowledgments  xiii

Chapter One

Introduction  3

Principles of Visual Economy 9

Vision and Race  13

The Problem of Pleasure  17

Vision in the Andean Postcolonial  20

Chapter Two

The Inca Operatic  25

The Sentient Citizen  28

Enlightening the Incas  32

The Inca Operatic  37

The Black Legend  42

The Peruvian Princess  46

Envisioning Desire  54

Chapter Three

An Economy of Vision  58

The Kings Gardener  61

The Politics of Description  65

The Great Humboldt  67

The Physiognomic Gaze  70

Humboldt’s Dilemma  74

The Language of Type  78

Vision and Type  81

Chapter Four

A One-Eyed Gaze  85

From Bethlehem to Beauty  87

White Feet, Black Breasts 92

Inca Virgins Reborn 97

Embodying Types  102

Chapter Five

Equivalent Images  107

Circulating Images  107

Image as Object  113

Aesthetics of the Same  119

Columns and Rows  123

The Final Index  132

Race and Photography  139

Chapter Six

The Face of a Nation  142

Race and Nation in Nineteenth-Century Peru  146

A Field of Flowers  151

The Visual Politics of Lima  157

Racial Aesthetics  163

Chapter Seven

The New Indians  168

Photography and Art in Peru  170

A Bohemian Aesthetic  173

Indigenista Vanguard  179

Photography and the New Indian Agenda  187

Sentiment and Science  194

Chapter Eight

Negotiating Modernity  198

Family Portraits  202

Vision, Race, and Modernity  212

Notes  217

References  239

Index  253

Illustrations

Figure 1.1 Girl with mirror. (Phot. Echegaray, Ayacucho; modern print by Fran Antmann. Courtesy of the Fototeca Andina, Centro Bartolomé de Las Casas, Cusco.)

Figure 1.2 Peruvian soldier and wife. (Phot. Courret, Lima. Courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress.)

Figure 1.3 Bolivian woman. (Courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress.)

Figure 1.4 Priests on Inca’s throne, Saqsawaman, Cusco. (Courtesy of the Museo Histórico Regional del Cusco.)

Figure 2.1 Incident at Cuenca. (La Condamine 1778. Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.)

Figure 2.2 Incas. (Frezier 1982 [1716].)

Figure 2.3 The Potosí Mines. (Bachelier 1720.)

Figure 2.4 Sun virgin from Voyage au Pérou en 1790. (Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.)

Figure 2.5 Title page for Les Indes galantes. (Rameau and Fuzélier 1971 [1735].)

Figure 2.6 The Peruvian princess dragg’d from the Temple of the Sun. (Graffigny n.d. Courtesy of the Fales Library, New York University Libraries.)

Figure 2.7 The Peruvian princess. (Graffigny 1752. Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.)

Figure 2.8 Allegory of conquest. (Marmontel 1777.)

Figure 2.9 Initiation of Cora as a sun virgin, 1777. (Marmontel 1777.)

Figure 2.10 Death of Cora. (Marmontel 1819.)

Figure 3.1 Skin color change. (Buffon 1749.)

Figure 3.2 Llamas. (Buffon 1749.)

Figure 3.3 Quindiu Pass in the Andean Cordillera. (Humboldt 1810.)

Figure 3.4 Cross-section of Andes. (Humboldt 1805.)

Figure 3.5 Ruins of Cañar. (Humboldt 1810.)

Figure 3.6 Inti-Guaicu Rock. (Humboldt 1810.)

Figure 4.1 Tapadas. (Pencil drawing, Johann Moritz Rugendas. Courtesy of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich.)

Figure 4.2 Announcement of a cockfight. (Watercolor, Léonce Angrand. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.)

Figure 4.3 Nuns and clergy with tapadas. (Watercolor, Léonce Angrand. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.)

Figure 4.4 Tapadas. (Oil on paper, Johann Moritz Rugendas. Courtesy of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich.)

Figure 4.5 Popular Rejoicing outside Lima. Oil. Courtesy of ING Barings, London.

Figure 4.6 Mestiza and Indian. (Pencil drawing, Léonce Angrand. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.)

Figure 4.7 Coastal Indians. (Watercolor, Léonce Angrand. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.)

Figure 4.8 Indian women. (Pencil drawing, Léonce Angrand. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.)

Figure 4.9 Tapadas in the plaza. (Oil, Johann Moritz Rugendas. Courtesy of Carlos Milla Batres, Lima, Peru.)

Figure 5.1 Cholas. (Carte de visite, Album Types et coutumes indiens du Pérou et de la Bolivia. Courtesy of the George Eastman House.)

Figure 5.2 Upper-class portrait (Phot. Courret, Lima. Courtesy of the George Eastman House.)

Figure 5.3 Stereograph: The fort where native chiefs held off sixteenth-century Spaniards, Cusco. (American Stereoscopic Company Courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress.)

Figure 5.4 Terèse Capac, 41 years old, of very pure race, taken to Paris by the Mariscal Santa Cruz (Paris, 1864. Courtesy of the Photothèque, Musée de l’Homme.)

Figure 5.5 Indian brigands. (Cartes de visite, Wiener Collection. Courtesy of the Photothèque, Musée de l’Homme.)

Figure 5.6 Water carriers. (Cartes de visite, Album Types et coutûmes indiens du Pérou et de la Bolivia. Courtesy of the George Eastman House.)

Figure 5.7 Lice-pickers. (Cartes de visite, Album Types et coutumes indiens du Pérou et de la Bolivia. Courtesy of the George Eastman House.)

Figure 5.8 Seated men and standing boys. (Cartes de visite, Album Types et coutumes indiens de Pérou et de las Bolivia. Courtesy of the George Eastman House.)

Figure 5.9 The Miraculous Baby Jesus and Large dragon with three heads. (Album 92 photographies de Bolivie offertes a las Société de Géographie par M. le Dr. L. C. Thibon, consul de Bolivie a Bruxelles. 27 juin 1885. Courtesy of the Société de Géographie, Paris.)

Figure 5.10 Thibon’s cholas. (Cartes de visite, Album 92 photographies de Bolivie offertes a la Société de Géographie par M. le Dr. L. C. Thibon, consul de Bolivie a Bruxelles. 27 juin 1885. Courtesy of the Société de géographie, Paris.)

Figure 5.11 Thibon’s Indians. (Cartes de visite, Album 92 photographies de Bolivie offertes a la Société de Géographie par M. le Dr. L. C. Thibon, consul de Bolivie a Bruxelles. 27 juin 1885. Courtesy of the Société de géographie, Paris.)

Figure 5.12 Porters. (Cartes de visite, Album 92 photographies de Bolivie offertes a la Société de Géographie par M. le Dr. L. C. Thibon, consul de Bolivie a Bruxelles. 27 juin 1885. Courtesy of the Société de géographie, Paris.)

Figure 5.13 Wiener’s guilds. (Cartes de visite, Wiener Collection. Courtesy of the Photothèque, Musée de l’Homme.)

Figure 5.14 M. Sandibal, Quechua Indian from Cochabamba (Bolivia)— Right profile and front. (Portrait parlé, Bertillon and Chervin 1909.)

Figure 5.15 The Bertillon apparatus in use in Bolivia. (Bertillon and Chervin 1909.)

Figure 5.16 Skull No. 21. (Photographie stéreométrique. Chervin 1908.)

Figure 6.1 Father Plaza. (Wood engraving by Riou. Fuentes 1867a.)

Figure 6.2 Title page of Lima. (Fuentes 1867a.)

Figure 6.3 Nuns. (Wood engraving. Fuentes 1867a.)

Figure 6.4 Limeña. (Lithograph. Fuentes 1867a.)

Figure 6.5 Zamba. (Lithograph. Fuentes 1867a.)

Figure 6.6 Indian woman from the mountains. (Lithograph. Fuentes 1867a.)

Figure 6.7 Negress who sells herbal teas and "Negress who sells chicha (corn beer)." (Wood engraving. Fuentes 1867a.)

Figure 6.8 Limeña. (Lithograph. Fuentes 1867a.)

Figure 7.1 Self-portrait. (Phot. Figueroa Aznar; modern print by Fran Antmann. Courtesy of Luis Figueroa Yabar.)

Figure 7.2 Bohemians. (Phot. Figueroa Aznar; modern print by Fran Antmann. Courtesy of Luis Figueroa Yabar.)

Figure 7.3 Salon Azul of Monseñor Yabar. (Phot. Figueroa Aznar; modern print by Fran Antmann. Courtesy of Luis Figueroa Yabar.)

Figure 7.4 Altar. (Phot. Figueroa Aznar; modern print by Fran Antmann. Courtesy of Luis Figueroa Yabar.)

Figure 7.5 Yabar family in Paucartambo. (Phot. Figueroa Aznar; modern print by Fran Antmann. Courtesy of Luis Figueroa Yabar.)

Figure 7.6 Indigenous type. (Phot. Figueroa Aznar; modern print by Fran Antmann. Courtesy of Luis Figueroa Yabar.)

Figure 7.7 Theater group. (Phot. Figueroa Aznar; modern print by Fran Antmann. Courtesy of Luis Figueroa Yabar.)

Figure 7.8 Self-portrait. (Phot. Figueroa Aznar; modern print by Fran Antmann. Courtesy of Luis Figueroa Yabar.)

Figure 7.9 Self-portrait. (Phot. Figueroa Aznar; modern print by Fran Antmann. Courtesy of Luis Figueroa Yabar.)

Figure 7.10 Study for Ollantay Theater Group. (Phot. Figueroa Aznar; modern print by Fran Antmann. Courtesy of Luis Figueroa Yabar.)

Figure 7.11 What the Traveler Dreamed. (Phot. Figueroa Aznar. Courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress.)

Figure 7.12 Self-portrait with painting Azares y celos andinos (Figueroa Aznar, Cusco). (Modern print by Fran Antmann. Courtesy of Luis Figueroa Yabar.)

Figure 8.1 Family portrait. (Phot. Cabrera; modern print by Fran Antmann. Courtesy of the Fototeca Andina, Centro Bartolomé de Las Casas, Cusco.)

Figure 8.2 Romainville family. (Courtesy of the Museo Histórico Regional del Cusco.)

Figure 8.3 Yabar family in Cusco. (Phot. Figueroa Aznar; modern print by Fran Antmann. Courtesy of Luis Figueroa Yabar.)

Figure 8.4 Family portrait. (Courtesy of the Museo Histórico Regional del Cusco.)

Figure 8.5 Family portrait. (Courtesy of the Museo Histórico Regional del Cusco.)

Figure 8.6 Family portrait. (Courtesy of the Museo Histórico Regional del Cusco.)

Figure 8.7 Family portrait. (Phot. Cabrera; modern print by Fran Antmann. Courtesy of the Fototeca Andina, Centro Bartolomé de Las Casas, Cusco.)

Figure 8.8 Family portrait. (Phot. Cabrera; modern print by Fran Antmann. Courtesy of the Fototeca Andina, Centro Bartolomé de Las Casas, Cusco.)

Figure 8.9 Family portrait. (Phot. Cabrera; modern print by Fran Antmann. Courtesy of the Fototeca Andina, Centro Bartolomé de Las Casas, Cusco.)

Acknowledgments

SINCE the day in 1985 when I first wrote down some unformed ideas about photography, representation, race, and the Andes, this book and I have traveled a long way Many people have accompanied me on this journey into the Andean image world. Some graciously coached me in their different spheres of knowledge. Others lent support and friendship as I ventured deeper and deeper into what often felt like an endless sea of images and words.

Fran Antmann was my partner in the early stages of the research. We wrote our first research proposals on Andean photography as collaborative efforts; we shared the J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship that launched my work on the Andean image world; we traveled together to the archives in London, Paris, Lima, and Cusco; and we jointly conceived and set up a permanent archive to house the plates and images we discovered in Cusco. Although our individual projects later took different forms, I am forever indebted to Fran for sharing with me her passion for photography, her knowledge of photographic history, and her skills as a photographer and researcher. Fran printed many of the photographs reproduced in chapters 7 and 8. Other friends who provided ideas and comments on my early forays into representational theory and colonial imagery include Ric Burns, Edward Said, Leyli Shayegan, Anne McClintock, Bruce Mannheim, Ruth Behar, Nancy Micklewright, Joanne Rappaport, Tom Zuidema, and Gary Urton.

The archive that Fran and I helped to form in Cusco now exists as the Fototeca Andina (Andean Photography Archive) at the Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolomé de Las Casas. Our work there would not have been possible without the encouragement and support of Adelma Benavente, Guido Delran, Ivan Hinojosa, and Henrique Urbano. Others who assisted in Cusco include Patricia Marín and the photographers Washington González, Cesar Meza, Eulogio Nishiyama, Horacio Ochoa, David Salas, and Gregorio Licuona. In Lima I benefited from the friendship and ideas of Nelson Manrique, Gustavo Buntinx, Marisol de la Cadena, and the late Alberto Flores-Galindo.

Of those who supported our work in Peru, I owe special debts to Luis Figueroa Yabar and Adelma Benavente. Luis and his mother, Ubaldina Yabar de Figueroa, shared with us the wonderful archive of photographic plates taken by his father, Juan Manuel Figueroa Aznar. Luis has graciously granted permission for me to publish his father’s photographs in this book. Adelma Benavente guided me through Cusco society and helped in many of the interviews with Cusqueño photographers and collectors. She continues to be the best single source on Peruvian photographic history.

I am also grateful to those institutions that generously provided access to their photographic collections and archives. These include the Museo Histórico Regional in Cusco and the Archivo Courret and Biblioteca Nacional in Lima; the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Musée de l’Homme, the Société de Géographie, and Gérard Lévy in Paris; the Prints and Photography Division of the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York; and the Royal Geographic Society in London.

During the final stages of writing, I benefited from the critical commentaries and hard work of colleagues and students at the New School for Social Research. Talal Asad, Steve Caton, Partha Chatterjee, Kate Crehan, David Gordon, Rayna Rapp, and Bill Roseberry provided insight, encouragement, and friendship. Research assistants who worked with me on different phases of the book include Joel Baumann, Juan Echeverri, Nina Hien, Erin Koch, Carmen Martinez, and Casey Walsh. Delphine Selles helped with some difficult French translations. Xavier Andrade, Tom Cummins, Johannes Fabian, Florencia Mallon, Ben Orlove, Gerardo Rénique, and Gary Urton provided insightful readings of the finished work. Michael Muse and Nina Hien helped to prepare the manuscript for publication. At Princeton University Press, I thank Mary Murrell, for her encouragement and support, and Elizabeth Gretz, for her superb editing.

Chapter Seven was originally published in a slightly different form in Representations, no. 38 (1992). Some of the material in Chapter Four was published in Dialectical Anthropology 12 (1988).

My research in Peruvian and European archives was funded by postdoctoral fellowships from the J. Paul Getty Foundation and the University of Michigan Society of Fellows. The Faculty Research Fund and the Provost’s Office of the New School for Social Research provided monies to offset the cost of developing and printing the photographs for the book.

A final word of thanks goes to Gerardo Rénique, who saw this project through its many different phases, encouraged its completion, and tolerated its excesses.

VISION, RACE, AND MODERNITY

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

ANTHROPOLOGISTS, as everyone knows, are people who go to the field. Frequently pictured, or at least imagined, wearing the pith helmets and khaki clothing of someone’s colonial past, anthropologists are charged with the task of recording native customs, deciphering savage tongues, and defending beleaguered traditions. Following the prescription of the founding father of ethnographic fieldwork, Bronislaw Malinowski, they are supposed to immerse themselves in the culture of the other and emerge decorously shaken but professionally unscathed to report their findings to scientific societies, professional associations, and crowded lecture halls.

The actual experience of fieldwork is, of course, quite different. As every fieldworker knows, the reality is far from romantic. The natives are sometimes far from friendly. The states in which natives live are far from welcoming. Even the reasons we do fieldwork itself are increasingly under siege. Finally, and often most perplexing of all, the natives tend to ask more and harder questions of the anthropologist than the other way around. Indeed, for me, the hardest questions about fieldwork have always come from the natives—in my case, Quechua-speaking peasants living in southern highland Peru. Why are you here? they would frequently ask. And what are you doing? Are you looking for gold? What are you writing down now? Why didn’t you write down what I just said? Sometimes they asked if I was crazy. Why else, they reasoned, would anyone want to come there of her own free will (unless she were looking for gold).

The peasants with whom I lived in southern highland Peru were probably right to be perplexed about the mysterious nature of my mission (which was to study their fiestas, fairs, history, and culture). They did not take long, however, to find some more practical niche for me to fill: I became the resident community photographer. Indeed, some months I spent more time taking, developing, and distributing snapshots than anything else. At first I volunteered both my services and the photographs. Soon, however, as my dwindling grant monies flowed into the multinational coffers of Kodak and the somewhat more rustic cash registers of Cusco’s photographic studios, I found that I needed rules. If a family wanted more than four poses, I made them pay for the extra pictures. If they wanted multiple copies, enlargements, or identity-card portraits, the same rule applied. I marveled at the rapidity with which they learned to exploit their local representative of what Walter Benjamin has dubbed the age of mechanical reproduction.

I also marveled at the poses they chose. They were, of course, familiar with photographic portraiture. Calendars with photographs of everything from nude gringas to plumed Incas graced the walls of their houses. Newspapers, books, and magazines were treasured objects brought from Cusco or Lima. Some people had studio portraits of relatives or ancestors wrapped carefully in old scraps of textiles or tucked away in the niches of their homes’ adobe walls. Despite the diversity of the photographs they had seen, the poses they chose for their own portraits were remarkably uniform. They stood stiffly, with their arms down at the side, facing the camera, with serious faces. Photographs with smiles were usually rejected, as were the unposed, or what we would call natural, photographs I took on my own. My subjects were also committed to being photographed in their best clothes. I did a good deal of my interviews and other fieldwork while hanging around houses waiting for them to wash and braid their hair, scrub the baby, and even trim the horses mane in preparation for the family portrait. I began to develop a theory about their understanding of what portraits were and their attachment to particular poses. According to my field notes, it had something to do with the history of photography (about which I knew virtually nothing at the time) and the types of poses required for the very old cameras still used in Cusco’s public plazas and commercial studios.

As my curiosity about peasants and photographs grew, I began to experiment. I took books of photographs to the field to show people. I wanted to see how they judged the pictures. What would they say? I think I expected them to be either indifferent or disapproving. But their comments proved to be much more astute. One day while looking through Sebastiao Salgado’s Other Americas, for example, my friend Olga surprised me.¹ I had chosen Salgado’s work to discuss with her, in part, because I found it to be a book with no easy answers. The photographs were lush, lavish, textured, undeniably beautiful. As prints, they were technically perfect. They appealed to everything I knew, consciously or unconsciously, about what a beautiful photograph was supposed to be. Yet as an anthropologist, I also found them alienating. They showed unhappy or destitute-looking people doing what appeared to be weird things. Where, I asked (somewhat self-righteously) were the people plowing fields, working in factories, or organizing strikes who also make up the other Americas?

Olga, however, found my concerns uninteresting. She liked the book a lot. Here were photographs that looked nothing like her own stiff-bodied portraits. Moreover, they were in black and white, a format that my clients systematically rejected. Nonetheless, this was her favorite among the several different books we had looked at. Why? I asked. Because, she said, poverty is beautiful. She proceeded to dissect several photographs for me. She liked how Salgado’s prints emphasized the texture of the peasants’ ratty clothes. She liked the fact that he showed an old peasant couple from the back, because this drew attention to the raggedness of their clothes (as well as, I thought, their anonymity). She even liked Salgado’s picture of cracked peasant feet—the one image on which my own negative opinion would not budge.

To this day, I’m not sure whether Olga convinced me with her praise for Other Americas. What she and her neighbors did do, however, was pique my curiosity about the ways in which visual images and visual technologies move across the boundaries that we often imagine as separating different cultures and classes. Clearly the peasants I photographed had their own ideas about photographs. These ideas shared much with my own. Yet they also differed in important ways. Olga’s comments about poverty and beauty—and my reaction to them—suggested to me the importance of reexamining my own assumptions about how political ideologies intersect with visual images. Similarly, our shared appreciation of the photographs’ formal qualities suggested something about the complex ways in which a European visual aesthetic had established its claims on our otherwise quite different ideas of the beautiful and the mundane.

Although Olga and the other people with whom I lived, talked, and worked in the Cusco provinces of Paruro and Chumbivilcas during the early 1980s will appear nowhere in the pages that follow, this book is, in many ways, indebted to them. Their understanding of the power—and magic—of photography helped me frame my own interests in the history of visual technologies in non-European settings. Their attitudes toward the photographic image made me think about the political problem of representation in a slightly more critical way. Finally, my own experience as community retratista (portraitist) was constantly in my mind as I stared at thousands of mute images of Andean peasants held in the photographic archives of New York, Washington, Rochester, London, Paris, Lima, and Cusco. How would I decipher the intentions of the photographers who took these, sometimes anonymous, images? How could I even begin to imagine what the subjects of these nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs were thinking? How would I talk about and theorize the different visual styles I began to detect in European and Peruvian photographs? Where else beyond the archive should I look for insights into the cultural and racial discourses that animated these silent images? What role did these photographs in fact play in shaping the identities and imaginations of the people who posed for them? What message about my own, late twentieth-century ideas of photography and the self were they sending back to me from their unique viewpoint on the Andean past? (Figure 1.1).

This book is an attempt to answer some of these questions. It is, in one sense, a contribution to a history of image-making in the Andes. In another, much broader sense, it uses visual images as a means to rethink the representational politics, cultural dichotomies, and discursive boundaries at work in the encounter between Europeans and the postcolonial Andean world. In describing this encounter, I am particularly concerned with investigating the role played by visual images in the circulation of fantasies, ideas, and sentiments between Europe and the Andes. One goal of the book is to ask what role visual discourses and visual images played in the intellectual formations and aesthetic projects that took shape in and around the Andean countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A second goal is to examine the role of visual images in the structuring and reproduction of the scientific projects, cultural sentiments, and aesthetic dispositions that characterize modernity in general, and modern racial discourse in particular. The visual materials analyzed here include images from eighteenth-century novels and operas, engravings from nineteenth-century scientific expeditions, cartes de visite, anthropometric photography, costumbrista painting, Peruvian indigenista art, and Cusqueño studio photography from the 1910s and 1920s.

Figure 1.1. Girl with mirror (c. 1925)

As this list of image forms and genres makes clear, my purpose is neither to write a history of visual representation in the Andes nor to compile a comprehensive inventory of the motifs, styles, technologies, and individuals implicated in constructing an image of the Andes. The diversity, even unorthodoxy, of the images and image-objects that have circulated around and through the Andes dictates against any such singular histories. It calls instead for a consideration of the astounding number and variety of images and image-objects through which that place called the Andes has been both imagined and desired, marginalized and forgotten by people on both sides of the Atlantic.

The term image world captures the complexity and multiplicity of this realm of images that we might imagine circulating among Europe, North America, and Andean South America. With this term, I hope to stress the simultaneously material and social nature of both vision and representation. Seeing and representing are material, insofar as they constitute means of intervening in the world. We do not simply see what is there before us. Rather, the specific ways in which we see (and represent) the world determine how we act upon that world and, in so doing, create what that world is. It is here, as well, that the social nature of vision comes into play, since both the seemingly individual act of seeing and the more obviously social act of representing occur in historically specific networks of social relations. The art historian Griselda Pollock has argued, the efficacy of representation relies on a ceaseless exchange with other representations.² It is a combination of these relationships of referral and exchange among images themselves, and the social and discursive relations connecting image-makers and consumers, that I think of as forming an image world.

The metaphor of an image world through which representations flow from place to place, person to person, culture to culture, and class to class also helps us to think more critically about the politics of representation. As I shall argue, the diversity of images and image-objects found in the Andean image world speaks against any simple relationship among representational technologies, surveillance, and power. Neither the peasants whose portraits I took, nor the many Peruvians with whom I later spoke while researching this book, nor the images I found in archives and books conformed to any simple political or class agendas. Nor were they immune to the seductions of ideology. Rather, like most of us, they seemed to occupy some more troublesome niche at the interstices of different ideological, political, and cultural positions. To understand the role of images in the construction of cultural and political hegemonies, it is necessary to abandon that theoretical discourse which sees the gaze—and hence the act of seeing—as a singular or one-sided instrument of domination and control. Instead, to explore the political uses of images—their relationship to power—I analyze the intricate and sometimes contradictory layering of relationships, attitudes, sentiments, and ambitions through which European and Andean peoples have invested images with meaning and value.

One way of thinking about the relationships and sentiments that give images their meaning is as a visual culture. Indeed, this might seem the obvious route for an anthropologist engaged in visual analysis. The term culture, however, brings with it a good deal of baggage.³ In both popular and anthropological usage, it carries a sense of the shared meanings and symbolic codes that can create communities of people. Although I would not want to dispense completely with the term visual culture, I have found the concept of a visual economy more useful for thinking about visual images as part of a comprehensive organization of people, ideas, and objects. In a general sense, the word economy suggests that the field of vision is organized in some systematic way. It also clearly suggests that this organization has as much to do with social relationships, inequality, and power as with shared meanings and community. In the more specific sense of a political economy, it also suggests that this organization bears some—not necessarily direct—relationship to the political and class structure of society as well as to the production and exchange of the material goods or commodities that form the life blood of modernity. Finally, the concept of visual economy allows us to think more clearly about the global—or at last trans-Atlantic—channels through which images (and discourses about images) have flowed between Europe and the Andes. It is relatively easy to imagine the people of Paris and Peru, for example, participating in the same economy. To imagine or speak of them as part of a shared culture is considerably more difficult. I use the word economy to frame my discussion of the Andean image world with the intention of capturing this sense of how visual images move across national and cultural boundaries.

The visual economy on which this book focuses was patterned around the production, circulation, consumption, and possession of images of the Andes and Andean peoples in the period running from roughly the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century. I have defined the chronological boundaries of this economy, on the one extreme, by the occurrence of certain shifts (about which I will have more to say in a moment) in the status of both vision and the observer in European epistemologies. On the other extreme, I have closed my inquiry in the decades preceding the advent of mass media and what Guy Debord has called the society of the spectacle. The changes wrought in our understanding of images and visual experience by television and cinema have been dramatic. This book considers the visual economy that anticipated these changes in visual technology, public culture, and the forms of state power they presumed.⁴

In analyzing this economy, my goal is twofold: On the one hand, I want to understand the specificity of the types of images through which Europe, and France in particular, imagined the Andes, and the role that Andean people played in the creation of those images.⁵ On the other hand, I am interested in understanding how the Andean image world participated in the formation of a modern visual economy. Two features in particular distinguished this visual economy from its Enlightenment and Renaissance predecessors. First, in the modern visual economy the domain of vision is organized around the continual production and circulation of interchangeable or serialized image objects and visual experiences. Second, the place of the human subject—or observer—is rearticulated to accommodate this highly mobile or fluid field of vision. These new concepts of observation, vision, and the visual image emerged toward the beginning of the nineteenth century at a time when Europe’s capitalist economy and political system were undergoing dramatic