Mountains, Kurakas and Mummies: Transformations in Indigenous Andean Sovereignty

Abstract

This essay argues that Andean mountains have not always embodied indigenous sovereignty as they do today. The lordly titles that mountains now bear were, until the second half of the colonial period, held by ancestral mummies and living indigenous political authorities in a previous configuration of power. Case studies show how that earlier regime “returned to the earth”, a development which eventually led to the rise of mountains as sovereign entities. This essay explores the processes by which this complex transition occurred and emphasizes the insurrections of 1780-4, which replaced the earlier regime with a more democratic community-based authority, to which modern mountain lords correspond.

Keywords

• mountains
• mummies
• power
• Andes
• pachakuti