This conference presents two conflicting scenarios to analyze the ongoing processes of indigenization of regional politics in the southern Peruvian Andes. Both scenarios are related to the Quyllurit’i pilgrimage. This shrine, located at the foot of a glacier eighty kilometers from the city of Cusco, is the focus of the largest pilgrimage in the Peruvian Andes.
The first scenario is a protest organized by the Council of Pilgrim Nations in the city of Cusco in 2016 demanding the cancellation of mining concessions adjacent to the Quyllurit’i shrine. During the protest, implicit forms of indigeneity were at the core of the dance and linguistic performance giving to it a peculiar distinctiveness.
The second scenario is the opposition of the Council of Pilgrim Nations to the appropriation of the pablito/ukuku dancer, central to the pilgrimage, by a regional political party during the 2014 municipal elections in Cusco. This conflict and the growing electoral appeal of indigenous symbols are imbricated with two processes: first, the slow democratization of regional society since the 1970s, and second, the emergence of global indigeneity and its instruments.
These processes have strengthened implicit forms of indigeneity practiced by the dancers and the Council of Nations, and have even led this institution to identify itself explicitly as an indigenous organization vis-à-vis the State.
