Eating Is Believing: Multivalent Andean Foods in Jesuit Writing from Peru, 1577–1653

The contradictory attitudes that Jesuit missionaries to viceregal Peru displayed toward various Andean staple foods with pre-contact ceremonial applications, most particularly cuy (guinea pig), suggest that they experienced a tension between colonial ambivalence and cultural accommodation. The Spani...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Borowitz, Molly (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
Check availability: HBZ Gateway
Interlibrary Loan:Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany)
Published: 2025
In: Journal of Jesuit studies
Year: 2025, Volume: 12, Issue: 3, Pages: 373-401
Further subjects:B colonial evangelization
B Ambivalence
B cuy
B extirpation
B Accommodation
B Idolatry
B Peru
B Andean foodways
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Summary:The contradictory attitudes that Jesuit missionaries to viceregal Peru displayed toward various Andean staple foods with pre-contact ceremonial applications, most particularly cuy (guinea pig), suggest that they experienced a tension between colonial ambivalence and cultural accommodation. The Spanish colonial regime incentivized them to maintain the differences between their European selves and their Andean congregants in order to reinforce their own (and their institutions’) authority in the colonial context, while the Society of Jesus encouraged them to bridge those differences by forging linguistic and cosmological analogies and by adopting some local behaviors, including—as they did in other missionary contexts—foodways. By the seventeenth century, however, the Jesuits in Peru had abandoned their initial attempts to accommodate multivalent Andean foods and met them instead with colonial ambivalence.
ISSN:2214-1332
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of Jesuit studies
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1163/22141332-12340002