STASIS, PROGRESS, AND EVOLUTION: TEMPORAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF INDIGENEITY AND NATION IN THE PERUVIAN PRESS (1860–1900)

PARÁLISIS, PROGRESO, Y EVOLUCIÓN: CONSTRUCCIONES TEMPORALES DE INDIGENIDAD Y NACIÓN EN LA PRENSA PERUANA (1860–1900)

In the 19^th century, many parts of the world experienced a shift towards temporal thinking. This was caused by various factors, including the abandonment of Christian time schemes in Europe, the discovery of historical causal chains by the natural sciences,^[1] and the acceleration of society through inventions such as the telegraph, railroads, industry, and the press.^[2] Additionally, epochal incidents like the French Revolution contributed to this shift.^[3] According to Norbert Elias, industrial societies required synchronization of complex and interdependent chains of action, such as factory production and railroad schedules.^[4] This led to an increased focus on ‘timing’, which in turn reified ‘time’ as a mighty dimension of human existence, ultimately enhancing time consciousness. A specific, publicly shared experience of time, characterized by simultaneity and acceleration, is considered fundamental for industrial modernity.^[5] This was also the case in (former) colonies that adopted scientific and technical innovations and the corresponding discourses, particularly the narrative of progress. The revolutions in Europe had their equivalent in epoch-making upheavals in these countries, like wars of independence, which heightened historical consciousness.

After Darwin, the idea of secular time in the sciences became “the agent of a unified world history”.^[6] But the new “linear, progressive, and dynamic time consciousness”^[7] not only underlay modern natural sciences. “Temporalized categories of interpreting the world”^[8] also informed an increased reflection on society and history that prepared the institutionalization of the social sciences. Research subjects began to be viewed as time processes and social institutions as changeable.^[9] This development was significantly driven by the press, which, as a fast medium, allowed authors to comment and influence societal change in real-time. This further piqued their interest in social (self-)observation, ethnographic description, and the theorization of society and history. Journalistic authors thus can be considered important agents in the “predisciplinary stage”^[10] of social science before its diversification and institutionalization. This makes it valuable to examine their texts from a perspective of the history of knowledge and science.

In Peru, particularly in Lima and rural centers like Cusco and Arequipa, there was a temporal and dynamic self-perception among the middle and upper classes. Journalistic, political, and emerging socio-scientific discourse mainly occurred in widely read newspapers and magazines. After independence, the central issue of these early examples of social thought was nation-building . the search for a unifying national identity.[^11] Benedict Anderson famously demonstrated the connection between the press market, time consciousness, and the idea of the nation. He argued that newspapers, by building on the idea of linear, ‘empty’ time inhabited by all, established temporal coincidences between unrelated events. This created an imaginary shared space in which these events took place, fostering a sense of simultaneity and community among readers.^[12] The expanding press market thus played a crucial role in the development of a national consciousness. In South America, the reach of newspapers corresponded to the reach of trade and official travel defined by the former colonial administrative units.^[13] All these factors had a complex and non-linear impact on the formation of national ‘imagined communities’.^[14]

After centuries of exoticization, “epistemological subalternization”,^[15] and economic exploitation of the Indigenous by the colonial power, they continued to be marginalized in the new republic, as Sobrevilla and Eastman explain:

In the aftermath of dissent and warfare, white elites – conservatives and liberals – came to a consensus that the ideals of European civilization, embodied in the exercise of citizenship, should be limited rather than universal, and race, class, and gender continued to be seen as markers of difference.^[16]

Similarly, Flores Galindo offered an interpretation of Peruvian independence that Peralta describes as “un recorrido marcado [...] por el fracaso del proyecto socialmente integrador [...] y el asentamiento de una práctica política contrarrevolucionaria, reaccionaria y discriminadora liderada por la elite criolla.”.^[17] However, as the racialized and subalternalized Indigenous population still constituted the overwhelming majority, the question of how to ‘integrate’ them into the projected nation took center stage. The 19^th century proves to be a key epoch both for the construction of the Peruvian nation, as well as for the construction of the Indigenous as the constitutive ‘Others’ of this nation – or, in Anne McClintock’s terms, as “expelled abject[s] [who] haunt[…] the subject as its inner constitutive boundary”.^[18]

Peruvian post-colonial discourse heavily relies on temporal categories, echoing the “imperial idea of linear time”^[19] and its associated notions of progress and regression that were prevalent in colonial discourse as well as in the social thought of 19th-century Europe. A central building block to the Peruvian nation –as duality rather than identity–^[20] was the proclaimed asynchronicity between the Andean and Amazonian populations and the coastal elites. This idea was later adopted seamlessly by Peruvian anthropology and sociology. Some of the literature on nation-building, the roles ascribed to Indigenous people,^[21] and on the formation of social sciences and anthropology in Peru^[22] addresses the topic of temporality.^[23] This article seeks to add to these accounts by examining the connections between concepts of time and indigeneity in 19^th-century Peruvian press from a perspective of the history of knowledge and science.

The analysis relies primarily on discourse analysis in the sense (though not to the extent, of course) of Michel Foucault. It asks what knowledge was considered ‘true’ at a given time, and what logic it followed that was consistent in itself but excluded other possible statements. Building on Philipp Sarasin’s proposal for a history of knowledge orders,^[24] this article focuses on the texts and statements themselves. The analysis is framed by a historical contextualization of the “actors of knowledge”,^[25] but they are not the primary focus.

After describing the socio-political context of the investigated author network and their publication outlets in section 2, section 3 will discuss the following core questions: How did temporalized categories of thought interact with constructions of Indigenous ‘Others’ and the nation of Peru? With which periods, developments, and temporal horizons were Indigenous people associated? Which awareness of time was attributed to them? Reading the texts as early sociological and anthropological thought, what does this tell us genealogically about the social sciences? Section 4 will critically examine the common narrative of a linear relationship between the widening and secularization of time concepts and the rise of the social sciences.^[26] As I will show, the texts rather exemplify a mental figure historian Reinhart Koselleck call “the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous”,^[27] which can be interpreted with Gonzalo Lamana as a strategy of exoticizing Indigenous people within complex power relations.^[28] Based on Johannes Fabian’s theorem of the constitutive role that the “denial of coevalness”^[29] has had for cultural anthropology, I will discuss the co-emergence of the social sciences with the division of humanity into racialized and temporalized ‘culture levels’, showing that the denial of temporality to oppressed groups is embedded in the history of the social sciences – not in spite of, but because of their commitment to the idea of linear time and progress.

The research questions will be addressed by analyzing newspaper and journal essays published in the Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima (hereafter referred to as Boletín) and in the newspaper El Perú Ilustrado. The newspaper aimed to reach a broad readership with a variety of content, including political essays, communiqués, portraits of the country and its customs, poems, travelogues, serialized novels, practical tips, advertisements, and translated texts by foreign authors. Its most prominent editor, Clorinda Matto de Turner (1854–1909), saw El Perú Ilustrado as an educational and progressive publication that promoted national literature and commerce.^[30] It was even referred to as “the highest literary tribune of Lima”^[31] by a contemporary. The Sociedad Geográfica de Lima, on the other hand, had a purely scientific mission. By the Society’s organizational chart and the comprehensive scientific approach of the time, the Boletín included seven sections dealing with zoology, botany, meteorology, geology, topography, demography, and the demarcation of Peru’s borders, among other topics. Of particular interest for this article are the publications of the section Razas, Etnografía, Arqueología y Geografía Histórica del Perú. I chose these two prominent publication outlets which were directed at different audiences to cover both the ‘scientific’ and ‘popular’ strands of public discourse. Despite their different audiences, these media were connected through personal, thematic, and political links.^[32] All examined texts were published in the second half of the 19^th century by sociologically interested literati, politicians, and scientists, some of them with an academic formation in Europe. They were part of a progressive journalistic-scientific-political network.

At this time, the young nation of Peru, after gaining independence from Spain in 1821, was experiencing ongoing political instability, civil wars, rapidly changing military governments, and a lost war against Chile (1879–1884). The coastal region achieved temporary wealth between 1840 and 1870 through guano and saltpeter exports, while in the Andes, the feudal structures inherited from the colonial regime remained largely intact. Peruvian society was deeply divided between ‘criollos’ –descendants of Europeans– and ‘indios’^.[33] The role of Indigenous people in the nation increasingly became the subject of a public discourse dominated by “founding patriarchs”.^[34]

Writing from a position of institutional power, these figures relied on the pen and the sword to impose a patriarchal and racially homogenizing vision of the nation that assigned hierarchical places to different social groups. Ultimately the ‘aristocratic republics,’ a term coined by Jorge Basadre, were designed by creole elites whose resentment of Spanish colonialism had more to do with taxation and economic liberalism than with any deep-seated decolonial ambition.^[35]

As Efraim Kristal outlines, the attitude towards the Indigenous varied with the economic position of the stakeholder.^[36] A conflict over the Indigenous workforce divided the white elite into essentially three parties:^[37] Large landowners in the Andes wanted to maintain feudal structures and the system and met Indigenous people with either contempt or paternalism. The coastal export oligarchy sought to modernize the country through national capital and ‘civilizational’ education programs. Meanwhile, modernization and industrialization supporters aimed to attract foreign capital and believed that granting full civil rights to Indigenous people and integrating them into a free labor market was the solution to the ‘Indian question’.^[38] The authors of the texts discussed here mainly held the latter view which will be particularly interesting in relation to the research questions. Clorinda Matto de Turner, for example, supported it.^[39] The Sociedad Amiga de los Indios .SAI), of which two of the discussed authors were members, took a mediating position, advocating both the ‘civilization through education’ and the civil rights approach.^[40] During its short existence (1867–1871), this organization successfully anchored the demand for civil rights in public discourse,, and granted legal support to Indigenous leaders and (political) education to their children, taking high personal risks.^[41] Yet, the SAI’s relationship with its ‘protégés’ was a form of tutelage that sought to avoid their uncontrolled self-activity, and it did not recognize ethnic diversity or communal identities and forms of organization like the ayllu.^[42] This paternalistic attitude is, as we will see, evident throughout the ‘industrialization and civil rights’ faction of the debate.^[43] The SAI later gave rise to Peru’s first political party, El Partido Civil. Manuel Pardo (1834–1878), the party’s founder, won the presidency in 1872, and Andrés Cáceres (1836–1923) won in 1886.

In 1891, Cáceres founded the Sociedad Geográfica de Lima .SGL) with the aim of promoting national unification through a single market that would allow all citizens to participate as workers and consumers. The SGL focused on defining Peru as a unified geographical, cultural, and political entity through exploration, boundary demarcation, and the demonstration of habitability and resource wealth to foreign investors. The promotion of science and industrial progress was seen as a means of achieving national integration.

Ideational similarities are reflected in close relationships with representatives of the Partido Civil, as well as with the Asociación Pro-Indíigena, the successor organization to the SAI.^[44] Cáceres also publicly supported Matto de Turner’s political position.^[45] The founder and first chairman of the SGL, Luis Carranza (1843–1898), at the same time co-edited the newspaper El Comercio and was a member of the SAI ^[46] and the Partido Civil. These personal connections thus formed a political, scientific, and journalistic network that advocated modernization and ‘civilization’, in both the evolutionist and civil rights senses of the word. The texts produced in this haze exhibit, though rarely simultaneously, various qualities of later social sciences, and especially anthropology. : The newspaper texts, on the one hand, present ethnographic, socio-theoretical, and historical-philosophical passages, as well as travelogues. They are generally more literary and entertaining than the Boletín texts. These, on the other hand, self-qualified as science, include field trip reports with holistic claims, purely ethnographic articles, descriptions of archaeological sites, tables of quantitative data, linguistic studies of Indigenous languages and their presumed origins, ethnohistorical, and also theoretical articles. Together, both publications can be assumed to have reached a broad audience in Lima’s educated class. Given their common traits and topics, as well as the authors’ connections, all these texts can be understood in Heilbron’s sense as belonging to a “flexible intellectual genre” in the “pre-disciplinary stage”^[47] of social sciences. Following the “constant activating appeal”^[48] of periodical journalism, which heightened the consciousness of time and change, social thought co-emerged with the debate around national identity, which again revolved around the ‘Indian question’. What from today’s perspective may appear as a blurring of boundaries between social thought, ethnography, politics, and journalism then rather was the absence of lines still to be drawn. As Méndez notes, however, access to the newspaper market, whether as a writer or reader, was a white privilege. This barrier consolidated privileged class solidarity and an exclusive idea of the nation.^[49]

Regarding the research questions of this article, the liberal faction’s texts are of particular interest for several reasons: They offer the richest evidence as far as indigeneity is concerned; and it was this faction that ultimately ‘won’ the debate, supporting and implementing the Peruvian constitution’s ideal of citizenship and promoting the incorporation of the nation into a developing globalized capitalist system. The group’s liberal self-image and commitment to progress and modern scientificity make them particularly interesting for exploring the connections and contradictions between early social science, temporalization, faith in progress, and the de-temporalization of ‘Others’.

For this research, both El Perú Ilustrado and the Boletín were systematically searched for texts and passages that address the Indigenous population of Peru and the role assigned to them in the emerging nation. The texts revealed a significant accumulation of temporal metaphors and patterns of interpretation, often in connection with other topics such as the nation, progress, technology, and labor.

In 1794, the newspaper Mercurio Peruano succinctly stated: .„Tenemos por imposible la unión […] del indio con el español”.^[50] During colonial times, the rulers, who identified themselves as Spaniards, did not intend to form a unified nation with their Peruvian subjects. Instead, their racism reproduced European absolutist class distinctions in the colonies to stabilize and legitimize oppression.^[51] After independence, as public thinkers and politicians searched for a unifying narrative, the so-called ‘cuestión del indio’ became inevitable and central: Should the Indigenous population – after all the vast majority – be part of the imagined national collective? And if so: under what conditions and playing which social role? How should the state interact with them?^[52] As Marzal observes, the integration of the Indigenous repeatedly became a matter of national identity: Assuming –and thereby discursively creating– an absolute otherness of Indigenous people, public thinkers asked how much cultural identity could be left to them while thinking of them as ‘Peruvians’.^[53]

This basic juxtaposition was decisively constructed in temporal terms. By attributing dynamism and acceleration to themselves and their social environment, progress-oriented authors created a foil against which the Indigenous were constructed as remarkably static.

Between 1888 and 1889, for example, a certain ‘Rómulo y Remo’ published a serialized account of a journey to Lake Titicaca entitled Impresiones Caseras in El Perú Ilustrado. The genre of the travelogue had grown in importance since the Enlightenment, when travel was seen as an excellent source of secular knowledge. Traveling to distant regions was seen as a ‘journey in time’, according to a spatialized notion of progress.^[54] At the same time, the title of the series, Impresiones Caseras, signals a claim, familiar from colonial discourses, to ‘domesticate’ the territories traveled, that is, to incorporate and take possession of them.^[55] The last chapter of the report revealed that Rómulo y Remo was the pseudonym of the historiographer and writer Rómulo Cúneo-Vidal (1856–1931), who also published historical articles in the Boletín and other newspapers. After an academic education in Spain, where he was influenced by Comtes’ positivism and Spencer’s evolutionist thought, he returned to his homeland in 1882 and devoted himself to the pre-Columbian and colonial history of southern Peru. In his historical work, he paid tribute to pre-Hispanic cultures and partially anticipated John Murra’s thesis on the vertical control of ecological levels in the economy of the Inca empire.^[56] His high regard for Inca culture is already expressed in Impresiones Caseras, written before the above-mentioned historical works. We will return to this subject later.

First, Rómulo y Remo travels to Lake Titicaca : by train, of course. After some ironic complaints about the unreliable timetable of the Peruvian railway^[57] which echo the ethics of time economy and punctuality that had arisen in Europe as a result of technical innovations such as railroad, pocket watches, and industrial labor,^[58] the thoroughly literary text reaches its first climax when the railway approaches the city of Arequipa at (by the standards of the time) breakneck speed:

Empieza entonces una carrera desenfrenada y casi loca; fantástica en medio de la invadiente oscuridad. El tren parece desquiciarse y precipitarse en un abismo. Debemos correr en algunos puntos más de una milla por minuto. Nos paramos en el balcón del último coche y debemos sujetarnos con fuerza para no ser arrojados á la línea por las bruscas inclinaciones y las récias sacudidas del coche al doblar las curvas. Ha bajado la noche y los detalles del camino: los cerros, los peñascos, en medio de los cuales desfilamos, toman fantásticos perfiles. El tren como fabuloso dragón vuela en medio de una chispeante nube de fuego. Es una escena, única, fantástica, grandiosa!^[59]

Using the means of transportation as a metaphor, this passage reflects both the increased mobility of the time and the intensified sensual perception that goes along with traveling. These topics are also present in European social sketches.^[60] Fast modern transport allowed for larger geographical spaces to be experienced first-hand, leading to a perceived “shrinking” and “disempowerment”^[61] of space. In a manner characteristic of the 19^th century, the lyrical self experiences a rush of acceleration and a reverent enthusiasm for technology.^[62] As noted by Wendorff, the new future-oriented time consciousness led to a dynamic self-perception. The future, which previously had been entrusted to God or limited by apocalyptic thinking, now seemed boundless and accessible to human activity. However, this increased aspiration and drive collided with the unchangeable limitation of time to 24 hours per day. The solution to this dilemma was acceleration, intensification, and – as in the text quoted – speed.^[63]

Once he arrives at his destination, Lake Titicaca, though, things slow down considerably for Rómulo. He boards a steamboat in the port of Puno, a town on a lagoon separated from the main lake by reeds. He describes the placid, waveless lake, the freezing air, and the lama-dung fueled boat’s way through a canal in the reeds like in slow motion:

El vapor deslizase en medio de dos bancos o vallas de verdura con la suavidad aterciopelada de una góndola a través de un canal veneciano. A las 9 de la mañana, el Yapurá [the boat's name] corre sus cinco millas por hora, que es el máximum de velocidad que dán de sí sus ya cansados calderos de buque veterano.^[64]

Just like the boat, he considers the government official in charge of navigation on Lake Titicaca too old. He asks for other officials: “[…] jóvenes, de iniciativa, de vigor y temple yankee […] para fomentar movimiento y lucro […]”.^[65] Here, too, the author conveys his idea of progress through a reflection on transportation and its speed, or rather slowness. He describes the lake’s arid coasts as “monotonous”^[66] and “dull”, and poses a rhetorical question that draws the readers’ attention to the region’s inhabitants, assuming a similarity between the landscape and its inhabitants: “Puede acaso estrañar que taciturnos, triste, inertes sean los moradores de esta adusta comarca?”.^[67]

Attributions of stasis, inertia, and slowness permeate not only the journalistic but also the scientific texts discussed here. The travelogue’s impressionistic style evokes feelings of both acceleration and standstill, while the scientific publications solidify these into ‘facts’. For example, historian and journalist Modesto Basadre (1816–1905) proposes a solution to the supposed Indigenous inertia in the Boletín. “Miéntras los gobiernos no impongan al indio el trabajo, es imposible el progreso y prosperidad pública”.^[68] Such assertions of Indigenous inertia and idleness^[69] can be interpreted as a power strategy against the occasional refusal of Indigenous people to work for colonial masters, and later for the white upper class, or to adapt work habits to their wishes^[70].

About the Uros,^[71] an ethnic group living at Lake Titicaca, physician Ignacio De La Puente says:

Los Uros, que viven todavía y se conservan con este nombre en los totorales de las islas y riberas meridionales del lago, constituyen una de las razas más atrasadas. […] Ramos dice que son poco menos que bestias feroces; Acosta que son tan brutales que no se les puede considerar como hombres.^[72]

And historian José Polo (1841–1918) writes about the same ethnic group: “A pesar de los siglos trascurridos y de los cambios operados en su derredor, se encuentran como cuando llegaron los conquistadores”.^[73] Remarkably, a “quick excursion”^[74] is sufficient for him to come to this conclusion. Thus, while the author handles time efficiently, his objects of study supposedly are untouched by it and unable to use it. An ephemeral criollo glance surveys centuries of Indigenous stasis: He alone has access to the hegemonic power of “panoptical time: [...] history consumed – at a glance – […] from a point of privileged invisibility”.^[75]

In this context, the texts of Luis Carranza, a physician, geographer, journalist, and “would-be ethnologist”^[76] who traveled to the Andes to analyze the social and economic conditions of the Indigenous population,^[77] are of particular interest. Carranza was the founder and first president of the SGL. He was self-trained in a wide array of natural science subjects and significantly influenced the modernization agenda of the civilista government. He advocated for the institutionalization of science and for a nationalism based on the geographical conquest and commodification of the Andean space, which went hand in hand with the racist imposition of “a specific hegemonic order on the country’s social fabric”.^[78] In the second volume of the Boletín, Carranza published an article titled Condiciones físicas e intelectuales del indio, which reveals the temporal codification of his thoughts. Here, Carranza poses and discusses the question of why the Indigenous are – in his eyes – artistically and intellectually poor despite living in an aesthetically inspiring and rich natural environment. He considered them effeminate by an excessively caring (in his terms, “communist”) and hierarchical Inca state that did not encourage individual ambition, whether in art, philosophy, or war. This explanation of a supposed phenomenon of the present through a social structure that had not existed for centuries is based on a preliminary assumption that is explicitly formulated at the beginning of the text:

Para hacer este estudio, es preciso ante todo, tener presente que el indio de hoy es el mismo que el de los tiempos del Imperio, en su carácter intelectual. Psicológicamente, es el indio de nuestros días, en el orden de los tipos morales, lo que el Mahamud [i.e., Mammoth], conservado por las nieves del mar sibérico, en el órden de los tipos orgánicos.^[79]

Thus, he conceived of the Indigenous population as a, in Eric Wolf’s terms, “people without history”,^[80] outside linear time and its possibilities. They are likened to the extinct mammoth, belonging more to the past than the present. As relics, he considers them worthy objects of study, whose frozen timelessness allows research to be postponed – until the researcher, busy in a fast-moving age, finds the time: “Estos estudios requieren más trabajo y tranquilidad del que permite la época agitada que atravesamos; pero sería una tarea intelectual útil y honrosa […]”.^[81]

Notwithstanding this, Carranza found time to revisit the issue for his subsequent Boletín article, Consideraciones generales sobre los departamentos del centro, bajo su aspecto económico y etnográfico, in which he further elaborated on the question of indigenous stasis. He saw the provinces of Ayacucho and Apurimac in a state of “social disintegration” and “lassitude”, for which he blamed the depravity of the clergy, political instability after independence, and the opening of markets to international competition. Nevertheless, Carranza deemed it necessary to study the “moral conditions of the Indigenous race” as the primary problem of the region.^[82] The text explains their persistent rejection of Spanish influence with a variety of arguments, including the aforementioned Inca rule and the attribution of responsibility to the excessively violent Spaniards, but also essentialist assertions. Thus, the text repeatedly suggests an extreme tenacity of the Indigenous people, considering it more influential than historical circumstances and relations:

Además de estos motivos, diremos así, objetivos, han influido otros de carácter subjetivo, para que el espíritu del indio se haya mostrado siempre refractario á la cultura europea; esos motivos han sido, y son aún, la índole estática de su carácter, sin analogía con la de ningún otro pueblo o raza humana.^[83]

Such characteristics are then attributed to the fact that these people, other than for example the African slaves (“en sí bárbaros”^[84] and therefore easily influenced), come from a deeply rooted civilization that has made profound modifications in the minds of its members: “La sociedad indígena […] ha permanecido aferrada a su incaismo”. Paternalist Inca rule had led to an “annihilation of personality”,^[85]“paralyzed intellect” and a lack of foresight.^[86] Despite this historicizing or ‘culturalist’ explanation, the subsequent argument claims that these supposedly acquired traits had become an integral part of the Indigenous ‘essence’ in a distant past. Carranza argues that such rigidity, despite continuous contact with Spanish culture, can only have an intrinsic cause:

Parece, pues, evidente que hay una causa subjetiva que hace á la raza indígena refractaria á toda civilización que no sea la suya, y que deba buscarse en ciertas condiciones fisiológicas ó étnicas, la razón de tal fenómeno. No hay en su cultura y en sus aspiraciones variación alguna: son hoy, lo que fueron antes y cómo serán siempre. Como puede explicarse este hecho sino es por una idiosincrasia particular de la naturaleza moral de esta raza?^[87]

This Indigenous ‘nature’ then is equated with “incaism”^[88] in a circular argument. The article presents an example of discursive essentialization par excellence since it not only ascribes to the Indigenous people a timeless, biologically or ‘racially’ conditioned essence but declares being essential and therefore unchanging as the central component of that essence. Even historical arguments only serve to explain the origin of the essence. This notion of timelessness symbolically displaces Indigenous people into what Anne McClintock calls “anachronistic space”.^[89]

Despite the preeminent focus on timelessness and stasis, the texts also show a tendency towards historicization, that is, to understand social situations as historically conditioned.^[90] The awareness of the mutability of human societies in the 19th century was influenced by the discoveries of the natural sciences that expanded the time frames and revealed continuities and causal chains in natural history. The resulting historicizing perspective recognizes its research subjects as context-bound and changeable, thus countering essentialism.^[91] However, when it comes to Peru’s indigenous societies, the historicizing narrative takes a different turn, repeating one dominant pattern of temporal change: decadence. Again, we find instructive passages in the texts by Cúneo-Vidal, Carranza, and the historian Agustín de la Rosa Toro.

The visit to Incan ruins at Lake Titicaca inspires Rómulo’s imagination:

Recuerdos de la grandeza para siempre declinada de un pueblo feliz que estas riberas habitó, visiones de espléndidos templos y palacios y verjeles, de turbas prosternadas; de sacerdotes y humeantes holocaustos, de coros de pálidas vestales, hijas predilectas del Sol...y de en medio de esa pompa imperial, un himno alado, ascendente hacía el Sol...hacia el Sol padre, el Sol beneficiador.^[92]

Returning to the present, he takes the actual, setting sun as a metaphor: “El sol ha declinado”. To the distant sounds of a Quena, which he classifies as “instrumento de recuerdo”,^[93] he returns to his accommodation. In a later chapter, the author describes the ruins of the temple erected by Inca Tupac Yupanqui on the Isla del Sol in a similarly glorifying vein, commenting on the ongoing significance of the site for the Indigenous population and, as will be discussed later, for Peru as ‘cradle of the nation’.: The Incas’ mythical origin was assumed to be here, and from here they spread throughout the empire in a peaceful conquista; a process of civilization that Cúneo-Vidal saw crowned by the reign of Manco Capac.^[94] From then on, however, the story is one of decline:

Derrumbado el edificio del imperio bajo el ataque violento y aterradar [sic] de la conquista: aniquilada la secular dinastía, holladas las instituciones, desechos los vínculos de la nación; no quedaba al pueblo peruano, en su inmenso naufragio, más refúgio que la sombra de sus altares.^[95]

The article then assesses the destruction of the temple and the erection of a church in its place as evidence of humanity’s moral progress: “¿Y por qué nó?No es este acaso un reflejo y una material afirmación de las evoluciones, de las transformaciones y progresiones del mundo moral?”.^[96] Thus, Cúneo-Vidal assumed a historicity of Indigenous life, but one that was moving downward, making way for ‘modern’ civilization.

Some texts attribute a share of responsibility for the decay to the colonial masters. For instance, Agustín de la Rosa Toro wrote that the Indigenous people developed an abhorrence of work because of the tyranny of the whites.^[97] Carranza suggested that the decline of Indigenous people was (besides their essential stasis) due to the failure of the clergy and governments after independence, as well as economic hardship.^[98] This echoes a general discursive trend that began in Europe around 1850. The trope of degeneration was used to legitimize intense policing and intervention upon groups such as the colonized, women, and the working class. The notion of decay from a former ‘civilization’ was quite common when referring to colonized people.^[99]

The sequence of decay – the conquest of ‘uncivilized’ Indigenous people by the Incas, subjugation of the Incas by the Spanish, ‘brutalization’ of the Indigenous population under a cruel colonial rule – consequently ends with the statement of the futurelessness of the Indigenous people. At this point, the standstill narrative and the decadence narrative converge: Both narratives freeze the presently living Indigenous people in their current state and deny them the possibility of future development and even future itself. Therefore, in this case, historicization does not inhibit essentialism.

The texts discussed here make two claims about the futurelessness of Indigenous people.: One argument states in an objectifying way that they ‘have no future’, and the other states that they are – subjectively, so to speak – not interested in the future and have no drive towards it. For instance, Cúneo-Vidal first establishes the figure of a local observer and specialist, the Italian ex-jesuit Tata Bonati, and then uses his authority to support his own assertion of an ‘objective’ lack of future for the Indigenous people:

Hemos encontrado en él un espíritu observador, una clara inteligencia, una positiva ilustración y esa flexibilidad de discusión y argucia que parece ser privilegio especial de la orden de Jesús. Y – lo que más interesaba a nosotros – hemos encontrado en él un conocimiento profundo de las condiciones del país, de las costumbres, de la lengua, de la importancia y del porvenir histórico de la raza indígena. En esto el Tata es radical: cree que la raza indígena del Perú es una entidad negativa sin porvenir ninguno superior al de la animalidad.^[100]

The remarkable expression “porvenir histórico” emphasizes the temporal dimensions.: The author’s focus is not on the next few years, but on the future as a truly historical dimension. In the later chapters of the travel report, he agrees with Tata Bonati several times. Observing a Mass for Indigenous believers, he calls out to them in his mind: “Rezad, pobres párias, sin patria, habed consuelo con la visión de una redención y de una futura justicia”.^[101] So, if he applies the concept of future to Indigenous people at all, it is a rather medieval one that has its goal in the hereafter.^[102]

The idea of an Indigenous futurelessness dictated by the inevitable course of history was complemented by the attribution of a subjective disinterest in the future: “El indio no se inquieta con el porvenir”.^[103] Here, de la Rosa Toro declares that Indigenous people were inherently ignorant of the future, regardless of their life circumstances. Once again, this characteristic is attributed to Inca rule: The provision of all necessities of life to the subjects resulted in a lack of initiative, entrepreneurial spirit, and future aspirations.^[104] In contrast, the concepts of precaution and economy which gained in importance in 19th century thought require anticipatory decisions.^[105] De la Rosa Toro and Carranza both lamented the Indigenous people’s lack of need and desire for property and goods – “esa propensión del Indio a no ensanchar el campo de sus necesidades” – that originated in “communist” Inca rule and was not properly corrected by Catholic priests: “[…] las tendencias comunistas de su carácter [son] tan opuestas al principio de propiedad, base del progreso de todos los pueblos, por ser el estímulo más poderoso para el trabajo individual que es la fuente del poder productor en las sociedades modernas”.^[106] The authors thus clearly recognized the special connection between future orientation and capitalist economy through the creation and promotion of individual needs, desires, and aspirations. They regarded these engines of economic growth and progress as inherently positive, a claim that illustrates the “epistemological links”^[107] between science on ‘the Other’, colonialism, and capitalism.

The texts further present a striking combination of historicism with progressivism, which can be seen as a characteristic expression of the 19^th century’s heightened time consciousness. The terms ‘history’ and ‘progress’ appeared simultaneously in European discourses. History, understood as an open and human-made process, was initially conceptualized within the framework of progress thinking.^[108] Nationalist thought often contains both nostalgia and progressivism, a contradiction that was resolved in colonial times by attributing progress to men and European-descendants and atavism to women and colonized populations.^[109] Moreover, both a sense of history and a sense of progress express an appreciation of historical time in general.^[110]

The modern idea of progress, originating in 18^th-century enlightenment philosophy, coevolved with the scientific expansion of temporal horizons, rapid technical innovation, and the rejection of Christian eschatology. Kant understood progress not only as a human possibility but elevated it to a moral duty, and Condorcet gave the concept of progress a universal claim linked to cultural evolutionism.^[111] The term was open to ideological interpretation and, from the beginning, carried with it the idea of ‘backwardness’ or ‘lagging’, which was associated with both politically opposing parties and non-Europeans. At the beginning of the 19^th century, European thought assumed that the future was infinite, open, and to be conquered by human action. Progress had become a political buzzword that no longer needed to be defined by a subject or object of progress.^[112] Progress also does not have a final destination, but rather a moving target that consists of continuous improvement. It is therefore an inherently temporal concept.^[113]

The idea of progress was also central to Peruvian nation-building. In the texts discussed so far, its importance was underscored by accounts of the distressing ‘regressiveness’ of the Indigenous people, against which a ‘progressive’ authorial self was implicitly marked. But there were also explicit considerations about progress illustrating the modernization agenda of the SGL mentioned earlier. For example, the diplomat Federico Alfonso Pezet (1859–1929) wrote an article advocating the facilitation of the exploitation of Peru’s natural resources through the construction of railroads: “En todo país, todo progreso tiene su razón de ser, es el resultado de larga experiencia y viene naturalmente a su debido tiempo. Las naciones son como individuos, tienen que comenzar por gatear para en seguida caminar y correr”.^[114] However, since academic and journalistic writers were concerned with the future-oriented project of building the Peruvian nation, they posed a great challenge to themselves by attributing to the majority of the population stagnation, decadence, and a lack of future. Indigenous culture had too long been depicted as a barrier to progress.^[115] In attempting to integrate into the national construction process people who were constantly relegated to the past, authors had to deal with a clash of temporal orientations in their thought. As Thurner states, “the Creole ‘us’ was haunted by a domestically distant and sometimes threatening indigenous ‘them’”.^[116]

One way to resolve this cognitive tension was to divide the Indigenous people into ‘Incas’ and ‘Indios’. As Méndez pointed out in her widely cited article Incas sí, indios no, this division went hand in hand with the creation of a white nationalism decisively promoted during the Peruvian-Bolivian confederation (1836–1839) by costumbrista author and journalist Felipe Pardo y Aliaga (1806–1868) and the intellectual elite of Lima to which he belonged. While the Peruvian government and parts of the business community favored the confederation, their opponents saw themselves as invaded by the Bolivian Santa Cruz. Pardo’s writings, however, attacked not so much his nationality as his Indigenous phenotype; and in the years that followed, which Méndez interprets as a key moment in the conception of Peruvian nationality, the exclusion and devaluation of ‘indios’ became its core. It should be noted, however, that this exclusion only applied to the Indigenous people living at that moment. The ‘Incas’, on the other hand, were glorified and incorporated into the image of the nation through a process of discursive appropriation.: From the 18^th century onwards, the colonial government had forbidden the Indigenous population to take up Inca traditions and gradually wiped out the Indigenous elite. In the 19^th century, the criollos finally took over the reproduction of the Inca symbology, which was thus politically neutralized.^[117] So, the colonists’ successors used a glorified and stylized Inca past to give historical depth to the nation of Peru. T: the few decades since independence were extended to centuries through the incorporation of the Inca heritage, “a dead golden age that was the future promise of national history”.^[118]

The texts discussed here followed the same discursive strategy: Cúneo-Vidal reclaimed the already described conquest of Peru by the Incas from Lake Titicaca for the history of Peru; he explicitly did not write ‘history’, ‘prehistory’ or ‘Indigenous history’ here, but “national history”.^[119] In a narrative style that was also characteristic of 19^th-century European travel writing, his lyrical self imagines the simultaneous presence of different layers of history in one place.^[120] ‘Rómulo y Remo’ moves horizontally through the landscape and its archaeological sites, while vertically providing it with historical depth through historical-philosophical digressions. He also displays archeological curiosity and describes the finds shown by a collector on the Isla del Sol in great detail, including the colors, texture, and supposed purpose of six tunics found in imperial tombs in Tiahuanaco.^[121] In line with his glorification of the Incas, Cúneo-Vidal combined his narrative of Indigenous decadence with the proposal to give the former rulers a prominent place in the literary and artistic production of the independent nation to distinguish it from Europe:

¿Porqué, para nuestros escritores y poetas, son letra muerta los cuadros magníficos del Perú primitivo, el drama de la conquista, la vida, los destinos, las aspiraciones, las amarguras infinitas que de su historia se desprenden, y, en cambio, tanto campo queda reservado á la pálida imitación de lo europeo?^[122]

The SGL also claimed the Inca heritage for its purposes. According to its scientific mission, the Society aimed to propagate Indigenous knowledge in the course of nation-building.^[123] The postulated national scientific tradition was extended into the distant past to underpin a scientific, modern, and thus future-oriented national self-image. This was realized through articles like Los cometas en tiempo de Huayna Capac^[124] and La papa en el Perú primitivo.^[125] The first one aims to provide astrological evidence for the comets legends reported to have appeared during the conquista. The second one emphasizes the pre-Columbian achievements in potato breeding. The Boletín also published an article in which the Argentine historian and politician Vicente Fidel López (1815–1903) emphasized the scientific superiority of pre-Columbian cultures over European ones:

Necesario es convenir que la América ha sido muy superior en inteligencia á la Europa. Sus obras prodigiosas, sus artes, sus grandes trabajos de matemáticas aplicadas, sus cálculos astronómicos, su gobierno tan bien establecido y tan altamente administrativo, su cultura, su tolerancia religiosa, su derecho civil y público, su sistema militar, sus fortificaciones admirables, tan superiores á todo lo que la Europa, (heredera del mundo antiguo) ha hecho por sí misma, antes del décimo séptimo siglo.^[126]

He then highlights the rational basis and special progressiveness of Indigenous medicine, surgery, metalworking, and chemistry. López, nevertheless, assumed a common origin of all human civilizations in the “Arian traditions”,^[127],and led a supposed proof that Quechua is related to the Indo-European languages.^[128] He thereby demonstrated familiarity with the racial theory that emerged at this time, which, closely linked to the idea of progress, naturalized political hierarchies as ‘racial’^[129] and demanded that ‘advanced’ peoples had the right, and indeed the duty, to rule.^[130] Thus, this text attributes considerable historical depth and importance to the nation of Peru by valorizing Inca culture, even placing it above European culture, and incorporating it into an assumed globe-spanning world history. Additionally, the emphasis on the scientific achievements of the Incas lends the nation a progressive, scientific trait. Historicism and progressivism found together in the frame of nation-building, and the common attribution of backwardness to the Indigenous was complicated by splitting them up into actually living ‘degenerates’, and a former, progressive ‘civilization’. This appropriation of a remote past, again, goes along with “time collapsing”.^[131] In far as racialized people are concerned, historical distance does not inhibit actuality, for they are imagined basically as timeless.

However, despite incorporating the pre-Columbian past into the national project, the problem of how to do so with the presently living, still ‘futureless’ Indigenous people, “mere shadows of the race and former civilization that preceded them”,^[132] remained a vital concern. In 1902, the Boletín published an article titled Los habitantes de la pampa del Ssacramento by the Presbyterian Francisco Sagols. The text argues that the rapid ‘civilization’ and Christianization of the local population was a prerequisite for the successful exploitation of the region’s natural resources. Before categorizing the ethnic groups as “salvajes”, “bárbaros”, and “civilizados”, Sagols sketches their customs and links the ‘civilization’ proposal to the problem of nationhood:

Háse calculado alguna vez lo que sería la República Peruana con el valioso contingente de esos silvestres hijos y con la pacífica posesión de sus vastos y riquísimos terrenos? En cambio de la ilustración, ellos darían sus tesoros […]. Además, ¿no es un baldón, un contrasentido, ver en pleno siglo XIX á tantos hombres bestias, errantes, feroces, antropófogos? ¿Si amamos al país que nos sustenta, podremos decir sin ruborizarnos á los extranjeros que esos salvajes son peruanos?^[133]

Thus, in the spirit of “nacionalismo criollo”,^[134] the author expresses his shame at the discrepancy between his idea of the nation and the reality of the Indigenous population, but he believes that they have the potential to be ‘developed’ through ‘enlightenment’ and economic growth. An article in El Peru Ilustrado titled Condición social e intelectual del Perú occidental by the US-American mine engineer Courtenay de Kalb also includes a notion of ‘potentiality’. Stylistically close to the Boletín articles, it describes the history and social structure in the lowlands, especially the relationship between Indigenous workers, or rather debt slaves, andhacienda owners, objectively. The author nevertheless attributes the Indigenous with inferior intelligence and maintains the idea of stasis (“el indio permanece estacionario”)^[135]. Yet, after a lengthy attempt to justify white men’s marriages to Indigenous women by pointing to their loneliness, he finally identifies the “potentiality” of Indigenous women as the crucial circumstance that motivates white men to engage in this practice.^[136]

‘Potential’ in the sense of an invested possibility yet to be realized is a genuinely future-oriented concept and therefore lent itself to the discursive integration of Indigenous people into the national project. Even Carranza, who discussed the problem of Indigenous stasis at length, concluded that future change and evolution were necessary and possible. In his already cited article Consideraciones generales sobre los departamentos del centro, he calls the Indigenous people “quite a powerful latent force”.^[137] They only lacked intelligent leadership that could make them – like worker bees or ants – a productive force in mining and agriculture.^[138] In his typical alternation between essentializing and circumstantial explanatory patterns, Carranza now attributes the alleged standstill to the country’s ruling classes: “Si [el indio] hoy se presenta como una fuerza estática, no es culpa suya sino de la clase social que lo dominó”.^[139] Possibly in an attempt to resolve contradictions, he also writes: “El indio, individualmente, se presenta como una fuerza estática; pero en colectividad, es una fuerza activa y poderosa”.^[140] It was up to the European willpower to “move this petrified race”^[141] for two reasons: “[…] por su propia conservación y por la nuestra nacionalidad misma”.^[142] He even calls the Indigenous people “núcleo de nuestra nacionalidad”.^[143] Thus, in the face of the postulated dynamic, evolving, and modern nation, the Indigenous population, which is “petrified” (depending on the passage, because of its peculiarities or because of historical circumstances), paradoxically has to change in order to be preserved – and it has to change in order to make this very nation possible in the first place.

This position corresponds to the liberal-positivist discourse of the SAI and the Partido Civil, which aimed to transform Indigenous people into full-fledged citizens by ‘awakening’ them from their ‘lethargy’ through education and integration as a labor force.^[144] Proposals for ‘encouraging’ Indigenous integration into the labor market included reintroducing tribute or creating new needs: “La idea de la creación del mercado en los Andes estaba íntimamente ligada a la idea de transformar al indígena en un trabajador y un consumidor libre”.^[145] This position was also notably defended by Manuel Pardo, son of the aforementioned costumbrista author Felipe Pardo and founder of the Partido Civil.^[146]

Through such political agents, the idea that Indigenous ‘evolution’ according to European criteria was indispensable for the wealth of the nation became a standard part of political discourse. This idea aligns with Koselleck’s insight that the subject of progress always was a “hypothetical people”,^[147] not a determined faction of humanity, but a role that could be occupied by different groups. The 19^th century pursuit of ‘modernization’ attempted to realize this hypothetical subject through measures like planning, accelerating, industrializing, and educating. Efforts such as those of the SAI can also be interpreted in this way. However, no one in this intellectual milieu imagined Indigenous people as agents of this evolution. They were still not credited with mastery of time, dynamism, or intrinsic future orientation. They were believed to require guidance from the ‘progressive’ and were thereby paradoxically fixed in their ‘lagging’ position by those who aimed to ‘evolve’ them.

The wide-ranging ensemble of temporal interpretations in the texts under study exemplifies what Koselleck calls “the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous”:^[148] Humans conceived of themselves and others as either ‘rushing ahead’ or ‘lagging behind’, even though they shared the same present. History was seen as “different time series, measured against each other in the expanding experience space […]. Rushing ahead and leaving behind becomes the basic temporal pattern of all history”.^[149] The idea that some people are stuck behind also implied that they should catch up; and from the ‘advanced’ (i.e., European) position, a duty to lead and to educate the ‘Others’ was derived.^[150] As McClintock shows, the idea of ‘degenerate’, ‘atavistic’, or ‘lagging’ portions of humanity was necessary for upper classes’ self-conception, “for the distance along the path of progress traveled by some portions of humanity could be measured only by the distance others lagged behind”.^[151] Given that the texts examined here were produced within the cross-genre field of pre-disciplinary social thinking, it is important to ask what this tells us about the history of knowledge and science.

According to the conventional history of social sciences, the heightened time consciousness of the 19^th century facilitated the rise of the social sciences because it allowed the present to be conceptualized as the temporary product of a continuous process taking place in time.^[152] In an instructive work on 19^th-century European journalism, Lauster takes up this thought: Sociological thought understands humans through their relations rather than their essence. Relations are changeable, while essence is not. Therefore, she distinguishes journalistic precursors of social sciences from stereotyping texts through the temporal depth and dynamic changeability that the former attest to their objects of inquiry, while the latter perceive them as static.^[153]

Given these considerations, it can be asked whether the texts under discussion rightfully can be considered precursors to social science, or even, in the case of the Boletín texts, whether their own claim of being scientific aligns with the temporal, relational, and anti-essentialist quality of science. This has been done for example by Monsalve who identifies the discourse of ‘el indio’ as “anti-sociological”^[154] because it attributed the situation to innate characteristics of the Indigenous rather than to the power relations. The author observes a “socio-racial scheme”^[155]of argumentation in the SAI that perpetuates racial stereotypes, such as lower intelligence, but attributes them to life circumstances. In a similar, albeit inverted way, the texts examined here provide essentializing explanations for observable power relations, sketching the Indigenous as being ‘born to be suppressed’. Historical trajectories of the Indigenous are described as processes of the formation of an essence (namely, character formation through Inca rule, and decadence). So, it could be concluded that the texts show approaches of relational, historicizing (in the modern sense of scientific) thinking, which, however, are nipped in the bud by the stereotypic writing that decontextualizes, racializes, naturalizes, and depoliticizes its objects of study.^[156]

However, I’d like to challenge the assumption that social science is exclusively tied to linear temporal interpretations and illuminate the importance for this very science of excluding factions of humanity from its own ‘progressive’ present. I thereby connect with Johannes Fabian, who in Time and the Other polemically identified anthropology’s “denial of coevalness”, “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse”,^[157] as a deeply political founding condition of the discipline:

Anthropology’s claim to power originated at its roots. […] Nowhere is this more clearly visible [...] than in the uses of Time anthropology makes when it strives to constitute its own object – the savage, the primitive, the Other. It is by diagnosing anthropology’s temporal discourse that one rediscovers the obvious, namely that there is no knowledge of the Other which is not also a temporal, a historical, a political act.^[158]

The texts discussed here give an impressive example of this observation. But in some passages, they go even further: They not only deny their subjects coevalness, but temporality altogether by declaring their essential unchangeability, by discursively freezing them, and by attesting to their ignorance of time. In other passages, the ‘Others’ are allowed to take part in some past historical processes but are excluded from the narrative as soon as it reaches the present. In the imagined future, the Indigenous are portrayed as either non-existent or in need of ‘evolution’, but never as agents of change. This fact is related to the intertwining of science with the idea of progress – not natural science’s ‘indifferent’, aimless idea of progress, but progress as a matter of faith.

In order to understand this, Fabian’s observation about the concept of time in evolutionary anthropology is key. The emerging social sciences did not simply adopt the neutral concept of linear progress, the expanded and naturalized time frame that Lyell and Darwin had introduced in the natural sciences. Natural science did not support any idea of inner necessity, purposefulness, or meaning in evolution. In an “intellectually regressive and politically reactionary” manner, these notions were reintroduced into the expanded time frame by social evolutionists (who were of great influence on authors like Cúneo-Vidal with strong connections to Europe):

By claiming to make sense of contemporary society in terms of evolutionary stages, the natural histories of evolutionism reintroduced a kind of specificity of time and place – in fact, a history of retroactive salvation – that has its closest counterpart in the Christian-medieval vision contested by the Enlightenment.^[159]

Additionally, progress – both in the sense of secular improvement and of salvation – is thought to be infinite, so there always has to be something that can be improved. This means that an infinite series of evils is required for infinite progress to occur.^[160] The idea of progress thus co-emerged with the division of humanity into racialized and geographically located ‘culture levels’: “The discovery of humanity as [a] totality was at the same time the discovery of the ‘savage’”.^[161] The colonized and Indigenous people were constructed as the evils that progress needed. “What makes the savage significant to the evolutionist’s Time is that he lives in an other Time”,^[162] or even: that he/she lives outside of time.

Because of this intertwining of the natural-science-based linear, extended understanding of time with normative, quasi-religious notions of progress, the social sciences, especially anthropology, are infected with the normative (read: Eurocentric, capitalist, colonial, and genealogically Christian) assumptions that the notion of progress carries with it. Social science conceives of human society as a fabric of temporal processes and cannot think of its subject without a static contrast foil – just as progress cannot happen without evils. Europeans had discovered linear time for themselves and discursively excluded the Others from it, and if they had not done so, social thought would have lost its very foundation: the temporal idea of progress. So, not only temporality, but the denial of temporality to the oppressed is folded into the history of social science, and anthropology in particular, as its very condition. What we find in the texts is not ‘pre-scientific thinking’ to be overcome by social science, but – borrowing Monsalve’s expression – the constitutive anti-sociological undercurrent of social science itself. This corresponds directly to the constitutive function that the exclusion of the Indigenous peoples had for Peruvian national identity: In both cases, “the abject returns to haunt modernity as its constitutive, inner repudiation”.^[163] Both social science and nation-building were ‘progressive’ and therefore temporal projects based on the devaluation of a de-temporalized ‘Other’.