Today, we visit the Regional Historical Museum in the centre of town, before curling up for the evening in our bungalow in front of a log fire to discuss everything under the sun over a glass of red wine. (There are very important advantages to cold nights).
(Incidentally, I get up each morning at six to continue edit two of Neville. I rather enjoy wearing fingerless gloves and a fleece to do so. If you replace vodka with coffee I rather fancy myself as James Joyce. There are very important advantages also, to cold mornings.)
Asides aside, our time in the museum today rather reinforces, or at least continues, yesterdays musings on loss of culture, because, perhaps necessarily, a key theme is the loss of the Quechua and indigenous language and culture, this time forceably so, by the Spanish Conquistadors.
The conquest and subsequent ruling by the Conquistadors was harsh and cruel, with that edge of fear I can't help but read into the oppression of one discrete group by another. Fear, I believe, is at the root of most acts of cruelty. The indigenous people were banned from using their own language, from practising their 'pagan' religion and from wearing their cultural dress, the punishments for infringements being public and torturous.
Change, inevitably, happened. The combination of fear and subtle linking in of the Spanish religious beliefs to those already held by the people, made it impossible for something not to have changed. The ancient people had believed in a huge cat-like, Puma-like creature which flashed lightening bolts from its eyes, spat hail, urinated rain and growled thunder. The Spanish called upon Saint James to aid them in their bloody crusades against the indigenous people, using 'visions' of Saint James appearing on a horse out of thunder and lightening during one particular battle, as a 'sign' that their bloodshed was supported by God. Over time, Saint James, 'Lord of the storm', replaced the original stormy puma.
This world, states the museum, at the very opening, following an explanation of the concept of 'Pachamama' (Mother Earth) which lives on today in Peruvian society, is our house, which all of us share.
It's a lovely concept. But we humans are uneasy housemates.
The museum documents two main forms of resistance to the enforced devastation of the indigenous culture. Resistance by the sword, in the form of Tupaq Amara, who led a bloody resistance battle in 1780, before being painfully tortured and killed by the Spanish. It is not only because he fought hard and died so bravely, states his write up, that he is so revered and so famous (he appears on some bank notes), it is that he gave the people courage to defend themselves, a sense that they did have the option to fight back.
The second type of resistance, though it happened rather earlier chronologically speaking, was resistance by the pen, in the form of Garilosi, a half blooded descendant of a marriage between Spanish and indigenous parents, who wrote down reams of histories and social accounts of the customs and beliefs of the indigineos people, giving them, (and himself), a sense of identity and a way of preserving, both at the time and for posterity, a culture in jeopardy.
Who now fights for the preservation of culture? And who are today's Conquistadors?
In some ways the only threat to the preservation of a culture is its age old, natural enemy, time.
There is perhaps also an argument that the main threat today is more insidious, the creeping in of outside influence, through media and travel. TV, as Diana had observed about Bolivia, does much to present another way of life in a way that seems much more glamorous and desirable.
In this sense, tourism may actually help in that it provides a reason to try to hold on. Tourists from the west will dilute through cultural exchange, but for an exchange to take place, both sides must have their currency.
Will tourism halt the ravages of time and media? And, unless we are talking about the deliberately enforced erosion of a culture, should we try?
Doesn't time also build and develop and create, as much as it is a force for decay?
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