A Note on Naming

"Kristiyanu timpu" means "time of the Christians" in the Bolivian indigenous language of Aymara. In her work on the particular nature of Christianity in the highlands of Potosí, Olivia Harris demonstrates how the phrase not only reflects a linguistic mutation of the Spanish "tiempo cristiano," but also a deeper sort of cultural transliteration. This adapted concept of Chrisitanity accepts the tradition's infamous claims to universality at the same time that it subverts them: as "Kristiyanu timpu" affirms that we are living in the Time of the Christian, it also renders Christianity relative by claiming the Spanish conquest as the point of the Aymara's own cosmological origin as a Christian people.

Does this imply that Christian Aymara are biding their time until this era of conquest and domination, along with its pushy evangelical religion, is over? On the contrary. The concept of "Kristiyanu timpu" may dislocate the dawning of the Christian age far from our standard year 0 A.D., yet it also embraces Christianity as something that has existed and should exist for the Aymara as long as they are around to praise the almighty Solar-Christ that has come to save them. Does this then signal the corruption and loss of authentic indigenous culture? Perhaps. Yet the more I learn as I prepare for my trip to Bolivia, the less sure I am that the collision of two cultures could ever be boiled down to a simple economy of gain and loss.

In his ethnography of the K'ulta, a rural Aymara-speaking community, Thomas Abercrombie squarely criticizes the common desire to frame indigenous cultures as pure, cohesive and admirably enduring entities that have withstood the manipulative evangelization and brutal ethnocide that seem invariably to accompany European conquests. He points out that in doing so, we in fact sell indigenous peoples short of the same sort of complex engagement in historical processes that we take for granted in our more "advanced" societies. While it might be politically advantageous for indigenous groups (and the groups that advocate for them) to claim the essential uniqueness, wisdom and ethnic-y charm of indigenous cultures, it ignores the fact that the indigenous peoples of Latin America have, for the past 500 some years, made various aspects of the culture of the conquerors their own, just as the Aymaras living in what is now Bolivia surely did, to some extent, with the Inca conquerors that came before the Spaniards. Indeed, Abercrombie contends that "'ethnic' cultural survival in the Andes [has] been shaped by native peoples’ active and collective engagement with, rather than flight from, the power-infused cultural programs of state elites" (Pathways of Memory and Power, p. 22). How else to explain the indignation of Abercombie's K'ulta informants when he suggested that they had a (pre-Colombian) pre-Christian history? While they acknowledged that there was another race of people who had been devastated by the coming of the Sun-Christ, they were not descended from these people, and "[as] far as the K'ulta are concerned, they are surely Christian, and so, too, were all their ancestors" (p. 117). Abercrombie goes on to point out that a history of the defeat of a culture of "noble savages" by resource-hungry, Bible-pushing conquerors "is one that Spaniards...may like to hear but it is not so edifying to the conquered" (p. 118). Rather, the K'ulta have their own way of doing history, and "it is not, as one might suppose, simply to deny an ancestral defeat, but to learn from it, turning their past to their own purposes, as we do."

What does all this mean about my impending trip to Bolivia to study women in the Methodist Evangelical Church? It means that there are no easy dualisms (or even tripartites or quadruplets) in which to fit religiosity, ethnicity, and so many other aspects of human culture. Protestant churches might be considered doubly "imperialistic" as they only arrived in Latin America in full force about a half a century ago, and have since been engaged in what some might call a second wave of Christian conquest as they gain converts by the thousands to what might seem to be very North American versions of Christianity. And while many anthropological studies I have read tried to explain this phenomenon by examining various pragmatic benefits of joining one of these newly growing churches, they don't pay much respect to the way believers themselves might articulate their faith. Most people don't decide to join a church based on a rational weighing of economic, political and social benefits. Rather, most would cite as reason enough their sincere love, devotion, and belief in the God they worship and the religious community in which they do so.

Thus, I am calling this blog "Kristiyanu Timpu" to respect the sense of meaning that living in a Christian era can and does provide for many Aymara believers. Perhaps, after all, our world will be torn down and remade again by that great relativizing force of time, leaving only mythological traces of the previous cosmological orders of major world religions like Christianity. Then we will have to rely on some historians in some distant future to piece together the nature of the Kristiyanu timpu. For now, then, I'll enjoy it while it lasts, and put myself to seeking out the deeper truths of this Kristiyanu Timpu. For the sun of the Solar-Christ is sweet on my face.