Resumen

SALOMON, Frank. Un-Ethnic Ethnohistory: On Peruvian Peasant Ideas of Autochtony. Desacatos [online]. 2001, n.7, pp.65-84. ISSN 2448-5144.

This paper is an exercising in relocating academic ethnohistory vis-à-vis vernacular ethnohistorical thinking in two respects: first, by questioning whether the transhistorical native vs. white opposition, which forms an all-but-unquestioned premise of most ethnohistoric paradigms, at all matches local paradigms; and second, by comparing academias "own" way of getting at colonial and postcolonial historical problems with the unofficial paleography (and archaeology) through which villagers explore the same. In Huarochirí Province (Peru) popular ethnohistory serves not to reify the concept of the autochthonous but to relativize it and detach it from the dominant national paradigm of ethnicity. Its vocation is to explain how one villagers can be "authentic" heirs of the land and yet not incur the racially unacceptable category of the "Indian". Collaboration with a folk paleographer shows how the colonial experience is construed -via a legend of collective "Indian' suicide- as the transcendence rather than the reification of "ethnic" categories.