The Ukumar: Monstrosity in the Evangelizing Discourse of the Conquest

Abstract

Many communities in the province of Jujuy still preserve a rich oral tradition whose origins go back to pre-Hispanic times. These oral discourses have undergone permanent reworkings as a result of their conflictive intersection with the colonial cultural universe.

By royal mandate, priests and colonial officials initiated a manipulation of these texts, which conferred identity on the pre-Hispanic subject and through which they sought to establish new sociocultural paradigms in America. Drawing on Aristotelian doctrines, the rational incapacity of the Indigenous person was demonstrated, and in this way the policy of domination of the more perfect over the less perfect was affirmed.

Missionaries were responsible for the manipulation of the imaginary of Indigenous communities. Trained in the use of the word, they took possession of Indigenous discourses. They emptied them of the contents that gave them meaning and had governed the pre-Hispanic world. They filled them with new meanings, often opposed and contradictory to the worldview of the native peoples of America.

This paper seeks to observe how, in the stories of the Ukumar, the potentialities of evangelizing discourse can be reactivated through the updating of the image of the monstrous as an image of racial degeneration.

Approaching the reading of the different versions of the Ukumar is an attempt to reactivate fragments of the discourse of evangelization, which is summoned in these texts through the monstrous and intensified by the description of the satanic.