Laura Leon Llerena

Laura Leon Llerena is an associate professor at Durham University (UK). Her research concentrates on the circulation of knowledge produced by and about Indigenous peoples from the 16th to the 18th centuries. She has published on translation and colonization of Indigenous languages, the coexistence of Indigenous and European media, and on the intertwining of material culture and notions of the sacred in social and cultural interactions. Her book Reading the Illegible. Indigenous Writing and the Limits of Colonial Hegemony in the Andes (2023) was published by University of Arizona Press. Her research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Volkswagen Stiftung, and John Carter Brown Library.

She has been invited by Prof. Antonella Romano (Centre Alexandre-Koyré) and will be joining the Visiting Professors Program in May 2024.

CONFÉRENCES

Conférences en anglais et espagnol

Ugly stones: Andean materiality and the sacred

The materiality of Indigenous culture was, from early on in the Spanish colonization process, a matter of concern to those tasked with the administration of the spiritual and earthly affairs related to natives in Peru. This seminar will delve into the methodologies used to identify, classify, and eventually ban or destroy objects that were thought to lend themselves to idolatrous beliefs and rituals. From Cristóbal de Albornoz’s Instrucción para descubrir todas las guacas del Pirú (ca. 1581-1585) to José de Arriaga’s La extirpación de la idolatría en el Perú (1621) among other important texts about the so-called indigenous idolatries, there was an endless list of disparate things related to idolatry that could include small stones, fruit, places hit by lightning, mountains and even lakes. A diachronic perspective reveals the undefined and everchanging notion of the sacred that Church and monarchy officials thought that Andeans attached to the materiality. Discussing the diverse strategies that those officials put in place to disrupt and erase links between people, objects, and spaces, the seminar ultimately explores the encounter, clash, and overlap between Christian and Indigenous materiality in the context of colonial Peru. 

Dans le cadre du séminaire de Isabel Yaya-McKenzi « Anthropologie du monde andin », EHESS

• 14 mai 2024, 14h-16h, https://enseignements.ehess.fr/2023-2024/ue/584, Salle AS1_08, EHESS, 54 boulevard Rasapail 75006 Paris
  

The world according to sermons

This seminar proposes to look at religious sermons as sources that transcend theological knowledge, mining information about the tribulations of daily life in Spanish Peru and explanations about geography, history and ideas about the world that had to be made explicit given the intended recipients of those sermons, Indigenous neophytes. The collection of books of sermons that circulated in Peru from the second half of the sixteenth century to the second half of the seventeenth century evolved from reprints of sermons conceived for parishioners elsewhere, to locally printed books of sermons that incorporated Indigenous languages to aid evangelization specifically in Peru. It was eventually understood that the incorporation of Indigenous peoples into de Christian world involved more than baptizing and memorizing doctrine. Evangelization strategies were refined to make natives understand the broader Christian world and their place in it. Framing doctrine under their immediate context  - which could include detailed references to earthquakes, diseases and pirates – was conceived as a way to turn Christianized Indians into men who could understand religious and secular colonial institutions and obey them.

Dans le cadre du séminaire de Antonella Romano « Savoirs et productions du monde au 16e siècle », EHESS

• 15 mai 2024, 15h30-19h30, https://enseignements.ehess.fr/2023-2024/ue/242,  Salle A527, Batiment EHESS, Campus Condorcet, 93300 Aubervilliers

Numeracy and colonialism

Studies about Spanish colonialism and indigenous response have tended to focus on alphabetic literacy as a tool for asserting ideological and administrative control. This seminar proposes to emphasize rather the role of numeracy, exploring the spaces it opened for Indigenous peoples in colonial Peru to negotiate and craft narratives of accounting and accountability. By the beginnings of the seventeenth century numeracy was not yet a settled issue in Europe even though, as recent studies have demonstrated, the race towards precision in arithmetical operations was central to the expansion and eventual consolidation of early modern European powers. In colonial Peru, Andean and European-introduced units of measurement, modes of valuation, and methods of accounting coexisted, shaping colonial labour relations, commercial exchanges and even Catholic evangelization practices. The seminar discusses the extent to which the complicated cultural heritage underlying the transition from Roman to Hindu-Arabic numerals in Spain may have had repercussions as far away as the Andean territory, with colonial officials more open to allow Indigenous numeracy notions and practices, such as the quipu (knotted cords used to record quantitative and narrative information) as complementary – if never well understood – tools for administration and governance of Indigenous populations.

Dans le cadre du séminaire de Olivier Allard, Anath Ariel de Vidas, Isabelle Daillant «  Séminaire d'anthropologie américaniste », EHESS

17 mai 2024, 10h-12h, https://enseignements.ehess.fr/2023-2024/ue/230, Maison Suger, 16-18 rue Suger, 75006 Paris

Christian Indians

This seminar discusses how the interface between native and non-native media shaped how Christianity was conceptualized by Andeans in early modern Peru. The conversion of Indigenous peoples into ‘Christian Indians’ built on the diffusion and imposition of religious doctrine as well as on the cultural transformation brought about by the introduction of alphabetic writing and the printing press. A growing body of scholarship has underlined the centrality that the printing press in the viceroyalty of Peru (1583) had in elaborating a homogenous Christian message for the indoctrination of Andeans, which involved the standardization of the native languages used for catechetical materials. The seminar looks into the formation and expansion of a colonial lettered culture, the colonization of Indigenous languages and the critical re-evaluation of the notion of literacy in the studies of Indigenous appropriation of alphabetic writing. Approaching three extraordinary Indigenous-authored texts written at the turn of the seventeenth century, the notion of legibility is introduced as a more productive way to investigate the coexistence of alphabetic writing and native media, and how Andeans endowed the technology of writing with a particular social role. Focusing on El Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno (c. 1615) by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, the Relación de antigüedades deste reyno del Pirú (c.1613) by Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua and the anonymous Huarochirí Manuscript (c.1598), the seminar will elaborate on how these texts authored by self-declared ‘Christian Indians’ aimed to disentangle and reframe the relation between history, writing and Christianity.

Dans le cadre du séminaire de Margherita Trento « Prosélytismes », EHESS

24 mai 2024, 14h30-16h30, https://enseignements.ehess.fr/2023-2024/ue/449, Salle 3.0, Centre de colloques, Cours des humanités, 93300 Aubervilliers