“Ya es otro tiempo el presente:” Indigenous ideas of time in the Andes during the Age of Revolutions (1780-1830)

Silvia Escanilla Huerta, Postdoctoral Fellow for Faculty Diversity, History

In late eighteenth-century judicial records, in the context of several indigenous riots and rebellions that shook the viceroyalty of Peru, different actors would mention the expression “Ya es otro tiempo el presente (this is a different time”). Ethnohistorians have demonstrated that Andean peoples did not possess a diachronic understanding of time but rather an idea of the past as implicit within the present and in constant interaction with it. Conversely, the future was perceived as a millenarian, catastrophic change or transformation, a necessary transformation that had no sense of continuity with the past but a complete transformation. So what did the expression “ya es otro tiempo el presente mean? Was it an indigenous millenarian understanding of time? Was it related to the context of abrupt and dramatic change that characterized the late eighteenth century in the Atlantic World? Was it all these things and more? Silvia Escanilla Huerta will share her ideas about what this expression might have meant, presenting a close reading of primary sources and building on the work of anthropologist Frank Salomon, subaltern theorist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and intellectual historian Reinhart Koselleck, among others.