MOON, SUN AND WITCHES: GENDER IDEOLOGIES AND CLASS IN INCA AND COLONIAL PERU - IRENE MARSHA SILVERBLATT

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The trilogy is complete. As far back as my review of FISTFUL OF SHELLS I had anticipated a sort of gyno-historical retelling of the forces that shaped the world from the early 16th century on. FISTFUL OF SHELLS is about African society and how these changes shaped the ways that people experienced and understood the world. CALIBAN AND THE WITCH took roughly the same time period but focused on Europeans and YT new-world residents. MOON SUN AND WITCHES completes the trilogy by focusing on the group left out of the other 2 books, the indigenous people of the new world. Specifically, the peoples of the Andes. In fact, I was at first worried that the book was going to be too deep in the Andean scholarship world. I’m not as familiar with that grouping of peoples and civilizations as I am with others, even others in the Americas. However, this is more than made up for with the final few chapters that really dial in on European notions of evil/the devil and now that colored the way Europeans viewed the people they subjugated. It was interesting to read about how this notion of a demonic pact developed (since it’s basically absent from the bible and European culture before the late middle ages) and how this idea was grafted onto the Native customs, when they didn’t have an equivalent notion. We can see how the ideas developed in CALIBAN AND THE WITCH are put to use in the New World (as a quick aside, it’s true that CATW is mostly about England/Protestants while the History of the Andes is more Iberian/Catholic, but I think it’s not unreasonable to put them together. I’d love a version of this book about the effect of English colonialism on Chesapeake Bay Native life, for instance, but we get what we get) for the same purpose. Namely, to both disempower women and to lay the social groundwork for the emergence of Capitalism. MSAW is incredibly ambitious and interesting in that it doesn’t just treat Andean life as static until the Spanish show up. It begins with the Inca conquest, where we get a preview of the ways that conquest distorts society. Typically, Andean life was sorted onto male and female paths but the responsibilities rights and access to resources were equal. The Inca impose a “conquest hierarchy” that privileges men, as the war-makers, but does not strip women of power women to the extent that the Spanish would shortly afterwards. European notions of women, again, masterfully outlined in CATW, do not have any substantial role in society. Christendom regulated them to minors, they never grew into full adults. The push-back by women (called Witchcraft) as well as the betrayal of these women by the men of the Andes is heartbreaking and predictable. It’s the same story, a new economic world-view comes in, fucks everything up, and gives us the world we have today. FISTFUL OF SHELLS, CALIBAN AND THE WITCH, and MOON SUN AND WITCHES tell the same story 3 ways and should be read together, probably in High School. 1531 Quipa