Death and Conversion in the Andes

“Death and Conversion in the Andes: Lima and Cuzco, 1532-1670 looks at death rituals of the people of South America during this time and how traditional native American beliefs fell to the wayside and how Christian rituals came into power. Gabriela Ramos executes this history well and provides much insight into the period . . . a solid addition to any world or native American history collection.” —The Midwest Book Review

“Gabriela Ramos makes a compelling case that death was at the center of the spiritual encounter between Andeans and Spaniards in colonial Peru. . . . Ramos’s work is based on a close reading of nearly five hundred wills written by indigenous residents of Lima and Cuzco . . . her deep research in previously underused sources offers abundant evidence of the importance of death in the encounter between Christians and indigenous people.” —Church History

“[Ramos’s] interdisciplinary analysis finds that elite burials in consecrated ground contributed to the spread and acceptance of Christianity among urban sectors of the Andean population. . . . She portrays the church and its dictates as both a destructive force (of traditional beliefs and practices) and one that ordered an emerging colonial society.” —The Americas

“Ramos exploited the difficult to access and use notarial records in Lima and Cuzco to amass a corpus of some 500 Indian testaments for her section on wills, graves, and funerary rites. This is a major effort and her analysis of them is exceptional. The result compares favorably to well-known studies of Spanish wills of the period, and provides for the possibility of comparison with the attitudes of the outsiders.” —Renaissance Quarterly

“Ramos’s subject is post-conquest Andean peoples’ adaptive creativity in relation to beliefs and practices surrounding death, as well as the ways in which society was remade and relationships between its members restructured, by means of adaptations in the conceptualization of death and their expression in everyday actions and rituals. The book is one of the more original contributions of recent years, and makes a fine complement to Gose.” —Bulletin of Latin American Research

“Gabriela Ramos has produced a deeply researched study that argues that the Christianization of death was crucial to the conversion of indigenous Andean peoples and to the construction of a colonial order. . . . a fine and important work of scholarship that is key to Andean studies and will contribute to ongoing discussions of how and why native Andean peoples responded, adapted, and made sense of Catholic tenets about the here and now and the hereafter.” —The Catholic Historical Review

“Deserving a featured place in the already excellent scholarship on religion in the Andes, Ramos’s work should contribute to graduate courses on empire, colonialism, evangelization, and ritual, as well as surveys of Latin American history. While future scholarship will have to examine death outside of Lima and Cuzco, Ramos’s careful study should serve as a point of departure for future work on religious conversion in colonial Latin America.” —Sixteenth Century Journal

“. . . Ramos examines the establishment of indigenous hospitals and parishes, will-making, confraternities, burial places and rites and, together with the detailed figures provided in the appendices, she succeeds in producing a well-written, systematic and pioneering study of an important aspect of early modern Andean society.” —Ecclesiastical History

“Ramos has meticulously revised hundreds of archival documents in the production of this study, and her account of urban Andeans’ readiness to accept Christianity is a welcome corrective to previous accounts of conversion that highlight resistance. . . . This is a valuable study, particularly where it touches on matters of the individual and personhood.” —Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

“Death and Conversion in the Andes is more than just another approach to the colonization and evangelization of the New World. It is also an innovative research on the birth of Andean Catholicism, a hybrid creed, which proves the strength of ancient beliefs on the one hand, and the adaptability of humans—in this case Andeans and Spaniards alike—to changing political, religious, and cultural circumstances, being, in Ramos’s words, ‘actors in a major cultural transformation.’” —European History Quarterly

“Ramos’s book adds an important layer to the manifold aspects of the encounter between victors and vanquished. It demonstrates, once more, that what may look like a complete success for Christianity was not merely a result of coercion, but rather the result of adoption and adaptation by both sides, with a hybrid religious doctrine as the outcome.” —European History Quarterly

“Ramos has meticulously revised hundreds of archival documents in the production of this study, and her account of urban Andeans’ readiness to accept Christianity is a welcome corrective to previous accounts of conversion that highlight resistance.” —Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute