| Abstract | This dissertation focuses on Andean cosmology and colonial concepts of healing in the Andes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This dissertation provides evidence that redefines aspects and understandings of Andean cosmology that pertain to health and well-being and the causes for illness. In the Andes, Native healers accessed the basis of power for healing that resided in a life-giving and life-animating essence called camac that continually renews and recharges the cosmos. Camac flows through focal areas or objects called huacas, which early colonial Andeans revered and honored. Andean notions of reciprocity (ayni) and shared resources (sapsi) required Natives to engage the living world to maintain the flow of energy for health and vitality. Andean healers utilized camac of spaces, huacas, plants, animals, minerals, and objects of power in their rites and rituals to affect change in people, livestock and crops, land, and relationships.
This purpose of this dissertation is to offer an alternative framework for Andean cosmology that centers on the flow of camac as the central concept for power in the Andes, whereby huacas serve as focal points of vitalizing energies. Huacas, like the sun and moon, are focal points of power that adhere to the cosmological order that were accessible to Andean healing specialists. Utilizing church documents, government documents, colonial reports and histories, early Quechua-Spanish dictionaries, and cultural remnants, I mitigate religious and ethnic biases by scrutinizing key terminology and phrases against attitudes, actions, and misunderstandings of early encounters between Andean ethnic groups and European colonizing agents. Redefining Andean cosmology in the early colonial period alters the Spanish-Catholic narrative of Native healers and their beliefs that currently permeate into the 21st century. |
