Ethnocide, science, ethnosuicide, and the historians of the vanishing: The extirpation of idolatries in the colonial Andes and a few contemporary variants

Abstract

This article addresses the participation of Indians in cultural genocide or ethnocide. We call the participation in the destruction of one's culture ethnosuicide. This article pays particular attention to the contradictions “salvage anthropology” incurs in its aim to write histories of the vanishing while training research collaborators to objectify their own culture, thereby capturing them (not necessarily successfully) in forms of thought that lead to ethnosuicide. Whereas the intent of the evangelical practices such as the confession clearly calls forth the annihilation of one's culture, the practice of science might have unintended destructive effects. We imagine a hypothetical graduate seminar in which an indigenous student would face the requirement to make sense of his or her world according to categories and forms of interpretation and explanation favored by anthropology. The readings range from Malinowski's initial definition of anthropological salvaging to Vivieros de Castro recent call for an ontological turn. We close with a reading of the Huarochiri manuscript (Peru 1609) that exemplifies the use of native collaborators to produce knowledge for extirpation campaigns in the colonial Andes.