Ideas - Manuscript Used to Eradicate Andean Thought is Now Key to Revitalizing it

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

The Huarochirí Manuscript is one of the few surviving records of Quechua worldviews in the early modern era. It was once used by the Catholic Church to identify and eradicate “idolatries.” But today, for philosophy professor Jorge Sanchez-Perez, the manuscript is a tool for reconstructing and revitalizing Andean metaphysics. *This episode originally aired on Feb. 6, 2023.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Skamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the Insider Scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. have about the Andean culture that existed before colonization. It's the equivalent to a Bible.

It has the mythological narratives of one of the least acknowledged original civilizations of the world. The Waruchiri manuscript was written in Quechua in the late 16th or early 17th century. I had never even heard of this manuscript before. You're not alone there. It was hidden for 300 years. Wow. How did it get discovered? It was a German ethnolinguist interested in indigenous languages from the Americas. And he was digging up and he traced it back to the Library of Madrid. Incredible. Wow.

So it had remained hidden for over 300 years. Since its rediscovery, the Warachiri Manuscript has been studied by some anthropologists. But for Peruvian-Canadian philosopher Jorge Sanchez-Perez, the manuscript has a different meaning. It's a spectacular and rare window into Andean metaphysics. It tells us how people saw the world. And by world, I don't mean planet. I mean reality. This episode of Ideas features my conversation with Jorge Sanchez-Perez about Andean philosophy and how wisdom from the Warachiri manuscript cuts to the heart of 21st century crises. century crises. My name is Jorge Sanchez-Perez. I'm an assistant professor at the University of Alberta, Department of Philosophy. When you were growing up in Peru, how much did you know about

this manuscript? Zero. Absolutely nothing. It's not really well known, not even in Peru, where it comes from. I sometimes joke that it is easier to learn about, in Peru, it's easier, sometimes it's easier to learn about the Critique of Pure Reason by Kant than it is to learn about the World Tree Manuscript. And why is that? And that it's a sad reality, because the goal of the manuscript was to be used as a tool for the eradication of Andean thought in order for it to be replaced with Christian worldviews brought by the Spanish conquerors. And they did a really good job. An excellent job. An excellent job in eradicating.

Sadly, yes. They were efficient at that. Eradicating. Sadly, yes. They were efficient at that. How much, can you talk about how much this document owes its existence to the vengeful actions of one particular Catholic priest? Sure. We can talk about Francisco de Avila. He was a priest in the late 1500s and early 1600s that had, you know, he had a particularly interesting life.

He was an orphan adopted by Spanish parents, and apparently he was a really smart guy. I mean, let's face it, the Catholic Church had really good training for its practitioners, for the members of the clergy. And he was well-trained in different philosophical views, and even though he was an orphan, he was, like I mentioned, he was adopted by Spanish parents who helped him get a position in the clergy. And he assumed the role of eradicator of idolatries in the central region of Peru. in the central region of Peru.

And part of that role involved the destruction of the rituals, the knowledge systems, the worldviews that may oppose that which were being brought to the Americas by the Spanish crown, which were the views of the Catholic Church, which philosophically are connected to a Sotiliento mystic tradition. So how is it that collecting those stories would have helped him to eradicate those beliefs? Well, he was a smart guy, like I said before, and he clearly understood that in order to properly eliminate something, you have to know that. If you don't understand what you're fighting against, you're not gonna be able to take it down as easily or at all.

And based on that, he ordered or commissioned the compilation of the idolatries, or the worldviews, mythologies, the set of beliefs that people in the Andean region of Huaracheri, Peru known as Huarachiri, held. So many people think, and I share that view, he got indigenous people, native Quechua speakers, to write down this set of oral traditions in a way that would give him access to secret, private, esoteric information that would later can be used against those practitioners of Andean worldviews to prove that the Western god was superior. So by means of identifying rituals,

sacred places, etc., he was able to basically claim that he had been given a foresight by the Judeo-Christian god, which allowed him to take over these places and knew the secrets of these people. The Warachiri manuscript has been used for utterly contradictory purposes. It was once used to eradicate Andean thought, and now, for scholars like Jorge, it's a tool to revitalize it. But even in the original text, you can see a tension between the desire to wipe out these beliefs and the desire to preserve them.

So I would point to the introduction. And I don't know if I will do enough justice to this, but may I try to translate briefly what it says to English? Absolutely. what it says to English?

Absolutely. If in ancient times, the forefathers of the Indians would have known writing, we wouldn't have lost the memory of their lives, as it has happened. It would be just like with the Spanish, that even today it is visible. Being like that, and since today we still don't have a written record,

I will write here the life of the forefathers of the men of Waruchiri, which was their fate and how they lived to this point in time. And in that way, each time, each people, I will write it down as it was from the beginning. So that is the preface of the text. And it sounds like a lament of what was lost. And it would be hard to think that a conquistador would be lamenting the loss of the knowledge and the memories of the forefathers of Andean people. So it's not a conquistador. That's one of the current debates.

A lot of ethnolinguists, they's still not certainty of who wrote this, but it seems like it was written by a native Quechua speaker under the request of Francisco de Avila. But the lament on itself seems quite the manifestation of the sorrow that comes from that world that has been lost. There's also an underlying meaning of trying to preserve things, right? the sorrow that comes from that world that has been lost, there's also an underlying meaning of trying to preserve things, right? Even if the audience is that which aims to destroy it, there seems to be still some sense in which the information has to be good enough to capture what is at stake here.

What is the difference between reading this manuscript through an anthropological lens and reading it as philosophy? Well, that's a great question. So philosophy tends to have as a goal the showing of the implicit, more often than not. As a philosopher, you're supposed to dig up and try to find what is assumed in certain positions. And anthropology usually tends to be a descriptive discipline, right? But when we look at the methodological tools used by anthropologists, usually we're going to be looking at tools developed by Western thinkers to analyze other societies. So when philosophers take a look at things, they might be able to not only describe what is being presented to them, but perhaps they can also tell you what is implicit when it comes to notions of existence, relationships, etc.

I'm not saying that anthropologists cannot do that. I'm saying that it seems to be the case that a lot of Western anthropologists have been too Western with their tools when approaching certain world views that are not Western. And of course this connects to a lot of projects to decolonize different disciplines. And what I'm doing in this sense is trying to decolonize philosophy in itself. It's trying to say, hey, we can do philosophy, not just believing that the only things that are worth looking at come from the Western world. What is it that makes this particular manuscript such a rich source for understanding Andean metaphysics, like how people thought about the nature of reality? Yeah, thank you for asking that. First of all, let me clarify this point, which is that every society has a point of view about existence, right? If we talk about epistemology, the study of theories of knowledge, to have a theory of knowledge or to presuppose some kind of knowledge, you're presupposing some kind of existence.

And that involves a set of views. So every society has those. a set of views. So every society has those. Now, as José María Arguera said, he was a Peruvian anthropologist who translated the manuscript from Quechua to Spanish. He said, this is the most important Quechua document in existence. And why so? Because this document contains narrations of mythical times. It tells us how people saw the world, and by world I don't mean planet, I mean reality, and how they positioned themselves with regard to that reality, what could be known about that reality, and how the rituals or processes of their social life interacted with each other and with the complex system of existence that they were a part of. the complex system of existence that they were a part of. Let's talk about a few of the concepts that are contained within the manuscript, starting with the idea of pacha.

What does that mean? So this is a concept that can have a vast array of meanings. Why? Because it's so fundamental. But if I have to narrow it down somehow, I would say that it could be translated as something like, not exactly, but something like time and space, but also a point in time and space. So it's about reality as a whole, but you can refer to Pacha within a particular context

to make further sense of the relationship that you are aiming at describing at the moment. For example, I can talk about different pachas, right? Because in Quechua, cuna means the pluralization. So you would say pachacuna. There are many pachas, many realities, but they're all connected in a meaningful way, and I'll get there. If we assume that reality is a set of relationships where everything is connected to each other,

nothing is just separated from other things in existence, then we can start thinking that we are part of those relationships. And those relationships include time and space, but not in separate terms. So if I want to talk about my positionality in a particular moment of existence, I would say, kai pacha, this point of reality. But if I want to talk about the world above me or, you know, a kind of patch that it's beyond my current reach in somehow, you could say

Hananpacha, which Hanan being above or superior in Quechua. If I want to talk about the inside reality or the reality that is hidden from our eyes because it's somewhere beneath what we might call the direct sensorial experience, I could say something like uku pacha, the pacha that is below. So pacha is this fundamental piece for understanding reality. And once you accept that reality is a complex set of relationships, then your perception of time also changes. So how does it change? Well, in Andean thought, many Andean cultures will tell you that the past is in front of you and the future is behind you.

Why? Because the past is that which you can see directly. It's that which you can see directly. In a sense, you're living in the past because that's the thing that you keep on seeing. The future is behind you because you don't really see it, even though you know it's there. But again, if we go back to the point that everything is related, then just because you don't perceive the future doesn't mean that it's not there. And it's not there now. there now. And of course, there are a number of stories in this manuscript that kind of illustrate this idea that time is not a linear, it doesn't work in a linear fashion. Right. Just because we perceive it to be in a linear fashion doesn't mean that it's in a linear fashion. Pacha is the totality of reality. And pacha is ever-present. And past, present, future co-exist at some points.

You can see the overlap between past, present, and future in the story of Pariyakaka. Can we start with Pariyakaka? Who is that? Yes. And Pariyakaka is one of the main characters of the Warachiri manuscript. Pariyakaka was a waka. Waka is sacred entity, but also the manifestations of the sacred entity. So the waka can be an apu, which is like a mountain, or a waka can be also a temple. But waka is also the individual self that is manifesting themselves in these forms. Pariakaka was a waka, or is a huaca, because he still remains. Pariacaca is a huaca that is manifested in this mountain known as Pariacaca,

which to this day, if you walk around the Huarachero region, you will find Pariacaca there, sitting. It's true. Look up a map of Peru, and you'll see a mountain that is still called Pariacaca. So in the case of Pariacaca, there's a really interesting conception of time, space, and the self that can be analyzed from the narration of his birth. It was at this time that the one called Pariakaka was born in the form of five eggs on Kondorkoto Mountain. A poor friendless man was the first to see and know the fact of his birth.

He was called Watiyahori, but he was also known as Pariyakaka's son. The birth is witnessed by his son. Yes. Yes. That's fascinating. But you see how it makes more sense if we understand that time is not linear. So the son is just a manifestation within a particular grand scale of relationships. Just because he's the son doesn't mean that he cannot be there for the birth of their father.

Let's take the story of Padhyakaka's birth step by step to see just how time works in this manuscript. They say that Watiyahori subsisted just by baking potatoes in earth pits, the way a poor man does, and people named him the baked potato gleaner. There was another man called Tamtanyangha, a very rich and powerful lord. All his houses looked like feather weavings, for they were thatched with wings of birds. He had yellow lamas, red and blue lamas. He owned lamas of every hue. Because Tamta Nyanka was so rich, he was able to pass himself off as a god. But then he got desperately sick. His illness went on for a great many years, and in time, people talked.

How can a man who knows so much, who's so powerful, be so sick? Be so sick. One day, Wat Yahudi was resting on a mountain when he overheard two foxes talking to each other about the mystery of the rich man's illness. And unlike all the wise men who tried to cure his disease, they knew the answer. His disease is this. While his wife was toasting maize,

a grain of maize popped from the griddle and got into her shame. She picked it out and served it to a man to eat. Today, they reckon, this is tantamount to adultery. Because of that, a snake had made its dwelling on top of that magnificent house and is eating them up. What's more, a toad, a two-headed one, lives under their grinding stone. There's a story in the manuscript about a grain of corn that goes into a woman's vagina, and the Quechua word used means that it went, quote-unquote, into her shame. Yes.

But the English translators note that at several points in the original manuscript, these shame-oriented words for sex or body parts are written over more plain-spoken Quechua terms that were scratched out. So given that, how reliable is this manuscript as a source of Quechua worldview, given that the text itself is already being influenced by Catholic sensibilities? Excellent question. And going back to your point about how things are translated to fit a certain Christian narrative, the term supay is usually translated as demon or devil, etc., which in Quechua tradition, it was just a person living or identity living

in one of the lower pachas, in a different kind of pacha. So it wasn't necessarily evil, but when we face a being that lives in the underground world and who might be worshiped by some people in the Andean region, Christianity just said, oh, that's just the devil, right? So Supai went from being this kind of sacred being that lived in a different level of pacha to be the devil or a demon. So given that, what's your gut say? What's your sense of how reliable a picture this is of the Quechua world here? this is of the Quechua world here? I think that it is one of the most reliable pictures we're going to get. Even if it's not perfect, it still has merits to give us a description of the world

that can inform further research. But it's a great starting point until at least we find something equivalent to this in perhaps another forgotten trunk or case in the Library of Madrid. Back to the story about Pariacaca and his son. Armed with the secret he overheard from the foxes, the poor man Huatiacuri goes to the rich man's house. He tells him that if he kills the snake and the toad, he will get well. And he extracts a promise that the rich man will worship his father, Pariakaka, who's just about to be born. After you recover, you must worship my father above all things. He'll be born tomorrow or the day after. And as for you, you're not such a powerful man.

If you were really powerful, you wouldn't be sick. After delivering the cure, Wat Yahudi has to complete a series of challenges. So he goes to his father, Pariakaka, still in the form of five eggs, who tells him how to outwit his opponent. When Wat Yahudi emerges victorious, it's finally time for Pariyakaka to be born. Pariyakaka flew forth from the five eggs in the shape of five falcons. These five falcons turned into humans and they began to roam around. Hearing all about the things people had done, about how that man called Tamtan Yangha had said, I am a god, Pariyakaka went into a rage. Rising up as rain,

he flushed them all away to the ocean, together with all their houses and lamas, sparing not a single one. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also hear Ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic.

I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley. The list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. The Warachiri Manuscript was once a tool to identify Indigenous idolatries in the Andean region of South America,

so they could be replaced with Catholic beliefs. But today, it's become a tool for revitalizing Andean thought. For philosophy professor Jorge Sanchez-Perez, it's a rich window into Andean metaphysics, how people thought about the future, the self, and human-animal relationships. And it includes conceptions of time that are radically different from Western ones. So, at several points in the manuscript,

it seems as though the writer is trying to untangle time and put everything in a chronological order the way we would do it here in the West. There was another Huaca named Kuniraya. We're not sure whether he existed before Pariacaca or maybe after him. Does that suggest a conflict between the Quechua understanding of history and the way that Spaniards understood it? I think it does, because these were oral traditions that weren't meant to be written down necessarily.

That's what makes this document so unique. These were oral traditions that were supposed to be transmitted between people and their ritual circumstances and their learning social context, etc. So if you grew up accepting the setup of reality of Pacha as a background, then it doesn't become problematic to have a story, a narration where you say, yeah, the son of Parikaka was there when Parikaka was born. It doesn't sound so odd, right? Just to make a parallel, for a lot of people who grew up in a Judeo-Christian tradition, talking about a holy trinity, a father, a son, and a holy spirit doesn't seem so odd, even though it's still a point of contention to make sense of that because the three of them are supposed to be the same entity. But we don't raise an eyebrow to that.

Does that make sense? It's hard to get one's head around that, to be honest. It is. It is, but it's probably because we haven't been exposed to this particular worldview that allows us to make more sense of this reality. And, you know, when I first started engaging with the manuscript, I could see this attempt of making a linear account of time to explain things to an audience that, or at least to the main audience, which was Francisco de Ávila, that wasn't necessarily in view or interested in accepting this notion of Pacha as something valuable for itself. So if you look at this worldview and this conception of time and space, if past and present and future can coexist, what does history look like in that view?

History looks like part of life. History is that which remains in our memory. And we can share with it. We can engage with history, but also we can engage with the future in a way that involves respect. And when you raise the future, it's hard not to ask this. You know, if the future already exists at the same moment we exist, what does that mean for free will? Well, in Antean thought, we have cycles, right? And time space is cyclical, which doesn't mean that time repeats itself. It just means that the cycle will occur once more.

And in that line of thought, you don't have to do everything the same in every cycle. Let me explain. Let's think of the cycle of the sun and agriculture, okay? Okay. Even if the sun completes a cycle every year, that doesn't mean that every crop is gonna be the same every year, right? We have a cycle that repeats itself,

or a new cycle, sorry, a cycle that appears once more, but it doesn't mean that the cycle is the same. That's why we have sometimes harvest seasons that are better than others. It's the same cycle, but it's not quite the same reality. To understand this notion of cycles in practical terms, we'll turn to the section where Padillacaca fights the previous huaca, or spiritual entity. One of his main goals was to fight the previous huaca that was giving the life force to the people of the area of Huaruchiri, the Kamak, Quechua term Kamak. So that previous huaca was Huayayo Harwincho, who gave people the ability to live basically forever and who also gave them the gift of having their crops grow in

five days. Although people did die in those times, they came back to life on the fifth day. And as for their foodstuffs, they ripened exactly five days after being planted. So it sounds like a pretty good deal. But in turn, they had to sacrifice their second child to him every time. He ordered the people to bear two children and no more. He would eat one of them himself. The parents would raise the other, whichever was loved best. So they were allowed to have two kids, but the second one had to die and be given as a sacrifice

to him. So Parikaka was born to fight against this previous waca that had the central position of kamagiver to the people of the area. But although the future already exists, even a deity like Pariacaca can't fully perceive it. When they engage in the fight, Pariacaca doesn't know necessarily what's going to be the outcome. He even says to, well, to one of his sons, he says to one person that was approaching the area where Wayayo Carwincho was living, he says, you don't have to sacrifice your kid. Just leave us the offerings of coca and corn, et cetera, here. And if I win, you won't have to kill your second born again. Right.

So he doesn't know the future, but he's still going to live through it. And just because we don't know the future doesn't mean that the future doesn't exist. And let me just get to more applied sense for this. If we talk about the obligations that we may have towards future generations, one of the main concerns that we might find in Western academic debates is, why should we be considering the well-being of people that do not exist yet? Well, in something like Andean thought, you might say, they do exist, you just cannot perceive them. That way of thinking about the future is particularly resonant for thinking about our relationship with the environment and with non-human beings.

Another question the Warachiri manuscript has lots to say about. In chapter three, there's a remarkable conversation between a llama and a human. Can you tell me about that story and what it kind of tells us about human-animal relationships? what it kind of tells us about human-animal relationships? Yeah, this is a story that I used to discuss with my students, issues surrounding epistemology. Let me just say it like this. If you see a bunch of animals running away from a direction, what would you do? Run along with them.

Run along with them. They know something you don't. And knowledge here, I might be using it in a broad sense, but bear with me. And I ask epistemologists that might be listening to this to not hate me so far, because they might get picky if I don't follow the platonic theory of justified true belief and so on and so forth. But there seems to be something that animals can have access to that sometimes we don't, right? And that access to information doesn't seem to be worthy of being dismissed. In the story, and again, I apologize if I'm not exactly following the manuscript, but again, these were all our stories, right?

That were meant to be told and shaped by the speaker in a particular pacha to transmit the meaning. So I'm going to go along and be like, in this pacha, I'm telling the story. So let's go back to the story. In ancient times, this world wanted to come to an end. In the story, we have a shepherd who had his llama being sat. Even though its owner let it rest in a patch of excellent pasture, it cried out, and wouldn't eat.

patch of excellent pasture. It cried out, in, in, and wouldn't eat. And the shepherd, arrogant as he was, got mad at the llama and said, you stupid animal, you have the best grass here, and yet you still complain. Why are you sad? The llama's owner got really angry and he threw the cob from some maize he had just eaten at the llama. Eat, dog. This is some fine grass I'm letting you rest in. And at that point, the llama basically defaced itself in a way and started talking in human language and said something like, I'm sad because you're too ignorant to realize that you're in danger. Then the lama began speaking like a human. You simpleton.

Soon, in five days, the ocean will overflow. Five days, the ocean will overflow. We're having a massive flood that's going to kill everything here, and you're still not realizing the danger in which you are right now. The man got good and scared. What's going to happen to us? Where can we go to save ourselves, he said. The lama replied, let's go to Vilcacoto Mountain.

There we'll be saved. And they escaped to the peak of the mountain where the animals had already been waiting for the catastrophe to happen. So, of course, this tells you that animals have access to information about the pacha. Their relationship with pacha might inform them about things that humans might not be always capable of perceiving with the same ease. And again, we're talking about relationships. So human-animal relationships are not necessarily those of domination. The world is not there to be subordinated to us, as some interpretations of the Judeo-Christian

tradition have led us to believe. In some worldviews, the world is this complex set of relationships, and you're just part of that. And that includes our relationship with animals. And sometimes it would be wise to pay attention to animals because their relationships allow them to gather information that you might not have access to. So if you extrapolate that into a bigger vision within this manuscript of how to live in harmony with the natural world, what does that vision look like? Well, again, I'm sorry for going back to this, but I think this makes the whole thing make more sense. relationships that follow its own order, its own aesthetic, then your job is to live within that order in a way that preserves the harmony. You're just part of this system, this complex system.

And if you break something of the system or if something gets distorted, then you should be trying to engage with some kind of ritual to restore that order. There's something very compelling about that. Of course, right? Like recently, well, last year, but recently enough, there was the worst oil spill took place in the coast of Peru. We're about four kilometers off the coast of the Bay of Ancon, and here the water is completely under a blanket of oil. The ocean current is helping to spread it even further, making it more difficult to clean. A Repsol had a boat that apparently, according to some news that just came out, was not made to match standards, either the boat or the connection or the plug, etc.

Something broke and animals were destroyed. Animal life ecosystems were destroyed, massive loss of animal life destroyed. Massive loss of animal life. Fishermen lost their capacity to access food. Everything has stopped. Unknown is going out to sea because we know that the fish is unusable and will be contaminated. Environmental authorities say the damage...

So we have a system that is leading us to a path where we're not even able to live, not even in harmony, to live at all. Yes. So if we don't think that we are part of this, of the world, if we don't think that there's a harmony to be respected, then we are not going to be able to survive what's coming. And just to give you a more practical example, when I grew up in Lima, winters were 14 degrees Celsius. Now they're hitting eight degrees. And I mean, I'm not that old.

We're talking about not more than 20 years ago, I was still getting 14 degrees Celsius winters. But now because of this change of conditions, we have the need to re-engineer and retrofit houses to accommodate cold winters or colder winters, which they never thought they would need. And now people might have to reshape their entire living conditions because we have broken something in the system. The system is broken. The cycle is distorted, to put it in those terms. And harmony has been lost. Now we could try to fix it or we could just ignore it. In reading the manuscript, one does get the impression that it's almost, first of all, it's reminiscent of other thoughts on living in harmony, other indigenous worldviews in North America. But also that it is kind of presaging what we're living right now. Yes. In Antion's thought, there are five eras, right, or five cycles that have taken place.

We are currently living in the fourth one, and the fifth one is the one that's going to come sooner than later. The fifth one is the one where the world will try to restore itself to some previous order. So basically, when Pacha finds that the cycle is over, for whatever reason, then the Pachacutec, the crashing of the Pacha comes to be, the change of eras. So something radical might be happening in the world, and Indian people are just waiting for that radical change. One thing I wanted to ask you is, in recent years, we've, you know, there have been several Latin American countries like Ecuador and Bolivia that have enshrined legal rights for trees and for nature. The Mother Earth law holds the land as sacred and defines it as a living system with rights to be protected from exploitation. Mother Earth designates protected areas in the forest and focuses on developing eco-friendly relationships between human beings. Can you see, or is it possible to draw a line from the philosophical concepts in the Warachiri manuscript to these laws?

Oh, of course, of course. So Andean thought has been underappreciated by philosophical practitioners. That, I think, is a fact. But that doesn't mean that Andean thought has not survived the onslaught of genocide and colonization. Even if it hasn't been paid attention by many academics in different parts of the world, we still have the knowledge living through the people. And that's why we can see these manifestations of people trying to live in harmony with the ecosystem, which they're a part of. And we have the concept of summa causae, which might be translated directly as living well. Bolivia has recently approved an important law called Mother Earth, and it's designed for living well.

It is a law that is not market-based. But it's not just well-being. It's not just, as one might translate, the Aristotelian eudaimonia. It's not about you being well. It's about just, as one might translate, the Aristotelian eudaimonia. It's not about you being well. It's about living well. It's about living in harmony with those relationships that you are part of. As you mentioned, the Ecuadorian, Bolivian, Chilean efforts to present us with the summa causae or summa camaya in Aymara are still there.

The efforts are still there. They have survived. There's a new wave of people thinking these indigenous knowledges make sense. Why are we destroying our forests, our oceans? We need those to survive. As much as people might like shiny objects made out of gold, I don't think you can eat gold. But it goes beyond not wanting to destroy our environment. Enshrining legal rights for parts of nature itself is a very novel concept, or at least to most of us. Yes, yes. But that also comes with the idea that we are not embracing an anthropocentric worldview.

We are facing now a culture that has survived the onslaught of colonization. And this culture is bringing to us the point that humans are not the center of existence. They're part of existence, not the center of it. And in that view, there seems to be a lot of commonalities with Maori views that have also allowed for the enshrining of rights of nature and even Innu views in Canada. Are there any other concepts in the Huaracheri manuscript that you think could inform 21st century politics? Well, the idea of considering future generations as part of our reality seems a powerful one already.

The idea of understanding that animals and nature has something to tell us if we pay attention to it is a powerful one already. But I would say that more than a concept that we can gather from the manuscript, we should be getting the realization that out of the six cradles of civilizations around the planet, we know so little of one of them, which is the Andean one. Six places on planet Earth evolve civilizations independently. And the conquistadores with the Catholic Church did such a good job that they eradicated most of the knowledge we had from one of them. That is a sad realization.

And if we're going to learn something for the 21st century, it's that we have so much to learn from each other if we are just willing to pay attention to different worldviews. Because what we have in front of us, it's a set of worldviews that will give us different consequences for different actions. After more than 30 days of violent and sometimes deadly clashes, Peru is under a state of emergency. Demonstrators have blocked roadways and shut down runways, with protesters hurling rocks and fury at security personnel,

who've pushed back with brutal and sometimes deadly force. The protests began after the impeachment of former President Pedro Castillo in December, after he tried to dissolve Congress by decree in a power grab and form an emergency government. Castillo was sacked anyway and arrested. His vice president, Dina Bulwarte, was sworn in as the new president, setting off demonstrations and deadly clashes from supporters who view Castillo as the duly elected leader.

The government imposing a police state in response. It's the latest episode in this long cycle that's happened. Right now, there are a series of manifestations in Peru against the political system. And this is something to keep an eye on because one of the, during the previous elections, one of the main concerns that a lot of people had in the capital of Peru, Lima, was that indigenous people were voting erroneously or that they didn't understood what was the best thing for them. And of course, these rigs of racism, discrimination, et cetera. And it wasn't like the previous candidate that was being chosen was necessarily a good one,

but it was a candidate of the indigenous people, like the only one that they had felt they had a connection for in a long time. The speech of an indigenous leader really resonated with me. They said, we have 500 years of grievances. You force us to play by your system, Western liberal democracy, and you lost. And now you don't want us to play by your system, Western liberal democracy, and you lost. And now you don't want us to put a president in place. We have 500 years of grievances, and we're going to march to Lima if you don't respect the results. Now, this resonated with me because they are not complaining about the beginning of the republic. The speech was about colonization. And this is a huge issue in a country like Peru, where more than 40% of the republic. The speech was about colonization. And this is a huge issue

in a country like Peru, where more than 40% of the population is purely indigenous, and over 90% is partly indigenous. Yeah. Is there anything you think from the manuscript that any wisdoms that might illuminate this moment, this political crisis that's happening in Peru? illuminate this moment, this political crisis that's happening in Peru? Yes. I would say the manuscript tells us that there's diversity in reality, and we have to embrace that. Monolithic systems of thought seem to be unable to deal with this diversity that is characteristic of Andean relations. Every town is different. Every town comes from a different huaca. They can trace back their lineage to a particular Waka from their area. So everybody has a different origin, yet they're all part of the same group of people. So diversity is a key element of the Andean worldview.

And if we're going to learn something, it's that you cannot rule people when you think that there's only one way of living life. And definitely you cannot rule over people that you have never taken the time to understand. Wow. That could be a lesson to a whole number of places around the world. Last couple of things. There seems to be a big historical irony in this whole story. You know, this manuscript that was once used to try to eradicate Quechua worldviews, now it can be used to resurrect and revitalize those worldviews. What do you make of that apparent irony? Well, I would say that is not apparent. apparent irony? Well, I would say that it's not apparent. I've wondered the same thing, right?

Because we have the tool meant for the destruction of Andean worldview is now our best tool to restore it. And yes, we can say that thanks to that tool, a lot of it was destroyed, but that was not the only one that was used. But this is a tool so well made that had to be made to understand what it was trying to destroy that is giving us the lessons to recover it. And yeah, the irony is there. And this time with this tool, we might do more. And that just comes to anything that we might have at hand, thinking that any tool can be a tool for construction or for destruction. It depends on how it's used. And whose hands it is in. And in whose hands it's in.

The other parallel irony is that the man who sought the suppression of these ideas, Avila, may have had indigenous roots himself. That's the Catholic eradicator of idolatries who commissioned the manuscript. Yes, yes. He was the amnestizo. What's the takeaway there? Well, you have to understand that racial and ethnic relationships in Peru are something else. Why?

Because we were told for hundreds of years that you were not indigenous. If you were mixed, you were mestizo. A mestizo allowed you to hide your indigenous identity because that indigenous identity was lower to the ones of the Europeans. So being a mestizo was already a way of hiding many of the facets of who you are. So I can tell that he was deemed mestizo legally. He was mixed. So he was told that he had something inferior in him that had to be destroyed. And he went on with the job of destroying it for everybody else, which is also a sad realization because I, when people ask me, hey, are you indigenous? I was like, well, I'm from Peru.

I'm para-indigenous, but I don't know if I would, we were told not to say that we're indigenous because we're mixed. And the mestizo label was meant to hide indigeneity in so many people in Peru. And it's still an ongoing debate. So people say, oh, but you speak Spanish. People might go to the Highlands and say, oh, but you speak Spanish. You cannot be indigenous. Well, it's more than that. So Francisco de Avila is a good example of somebody whose identity was in tension with who they were, because they were told that part of their identity was shameful.

And that is a political struggle that we have to face every day in many parts of the world. That is very true. And it's a very tragic story. It's a tragic story. You're taught to hate yourself. hate yourself. Finally, how do you think bringing this back to life, this philosophical tradition in the manuscript, could inform what it means to, as you say, live well together in the 21st century? Well, I think that if we are open to discussing different ways of conceiving existence, and we're open to consider ourselves as part of a larger set of relationships,

we're going to be facing a new way of engaging with each other and with the world. I think that if we are capable of seeing the value of these philosophical views from indigenous people from the world, in this case from the Andes, we're going to see that we have options. We have options to live in a way that doesn't jeopardize our own lives. Jorge, this has been so illuminating. Thank you so much for sharing with us. Thank you for the invitation. I had a pleasure talking about this.

And whenever you want to keep talking, just let me know. Will do. Thank you. On Ideas, you were listening to my conversation with Jorge Sanchez-Perez about Andean philosophy and the Warachiri manuscript. This episode was produced by Pauline Holdsworth. Special thanks to Lisa Shapiro at the Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy Project, to Colton Hutchinson at CBC Edmonton, and to Jake Perlman at KUT in Austin. Readings in Quechua by Hermani Ojeda-Ludena. Readings in English by Nahid Mustafa.

Technical production, Danielle Duval and Laura Antonelli Web Producer, Lisa Ayuso Senior Producer, Nikola Lukšić Greg Kelly is the Executive Producer of Ideas and I'm Nala Ayed. It has the mythological narratives of one of the least acknowledged original civilizations of the world. You're trying to change that. Yes.

Yes. One interview at a time. Exactly. Exactly. One interview at a time. Exactly.