Indigenous Intellectuals, Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes

Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis eds., Indigenous Intellectuals, Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2014. 323 pages. ISBN 978-0-82235660-8. $24.95 USD paperback.

This is a superb collection of essays on one of the most exciting topics in Latin American history: the intellectual history of people not usually considered intellectuals-in this case Native people. The authors draw on a distinguished intellectual lineage that begins, in essence, with Karl Marx, and descends through Antonio Gramsci, E. P. Thompson, and the influential Africanist Steven Feierman, whose study of peasant intellectuals in Tanzania launched a wave of studies of the same topic in other locations.

The editors' framing of the project is thoughtful. They are sensitive to historical change on both the Indigenous and European sides of the cultural divide, and to the many ways in which knowledge could be inscribed - a term they often use in order to avoid the fraught term "writing." Maps, codices, quipus, dances, oral traditions, and other technologies of inscription fall within their generous definition of intellectual productivity. The contributors are also sensitive to contrasts between the development of New Spain and that of the Andes, beginning with the fact that many more surviving documents in Native languages come from Mesoamerica than from the former territory of the Inca Empire. A further leitmotif that runs through many of these essays is what...