The making of invisibility: colonialism and multiple erasures along the southern Peruvian shores

Abstract

Studies focused on communities and peoples marginalized in the past often must contend with their erasure both in archives and in the material record, and run the risk of reproducing those erasures in the present. Such is the case of maritime communities in South America under Spanish colonial rule. Fishing folks in southern Peru are very di ffi cult to ‘ locate ’ whether one looks to documentary sources, oral histories, or archaeological remains. Not only is the historiography scarce and in many cases quite old, but archaeological research has largely failed to connect documentary data with the material record. Indeed, I argue that the invisibilization of maritime communities since the Spanish invasion has remained an epistemological constant and that modern researchers, as heirs of colonial ideologies and structures, have largely replicated many of the same biases imposed during Spanish colonial rule. In other words, the invisibilization of maritime communities and the erasure of their material and documentary archives is not something of the past, but very much a fact of the present. Furthermore, some of the most remarkable objects that these fi shing communities used are largely unknown, except for a few examples held in museums, yet another expression of the rele-gation of these communities