|
|||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||
|
 |
 |
Ethnohistorian, autodidact, and Doctor Honoris Causa. Maria Rostworowski was born in Barranco, Lima, in 1915. The daughter of a Polish father and a mother from Puno, she traveled with her family to Europe where she lived almost twenty years, a good part of which were spent in the French countryside. An autodidact, her reencounter with Peru motivated her to undertake the study of Peruvian history following a rigorous and innovative route. Maria Rostworowski received the Doctor Honoris Causa degree from the San Agustin National University [Universidad Nacional de San Agustín] of Arequipa as recognition of her pioneer work in ethnohistorical studies of Peru. On receiving the medal that symbolizes this academic degree, the first degree she had received in her life, Maria, moved, with her voice trembling, modestly but with certainty, thanked the university for the laying on of hands which she felt she deserved. Four decades have passed, then, since the appearance of her first book, winner of the National Cultural Prize in 1952 and published a year later under the title Pachacutec Inca Yupanqui (Torres Aguirre, 1953). Raul Porras Barrenechea, her teacher, had advised her to do research on Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, but with her project of the biography of the Inca, Maria had already assumed that commitment to the Andean world that would guide her future career of which the biographical profile based on the chroniclers' accounts was the first step. In her second book Curacas y sucesiones. Costa norte [Curacas and Successions: North Coast] (Minerva, 1961), Maria started a long sequence of research that would center around the study of the Peruvian - or Andean, as she prefers to call it - coast, bearing in mind that the Andes defines a geographic system which takes in coast, mountains and tropical forest. Etnía y sociedad. Costa peruana prehispánica [Ethnic Group and Society: The Prehispanic Peruvian Coast] (IEP, 1977) and Señoríos indígenas de Lima y Canta [Indigenous Lords of Lima and Canta] (IEP, 1978) appeared later, both studies of a marked local and regional character that permit one to understand the logic of the social and geographical interrelationship of the ethnic groups on the central and south coasts of Peru. In the same search to identify the patterns which ruled prehispanic Andean societies, she would later publish Recursos naturales renovables y pesca. Siglos XVI y XVII [Renewable Natural Resources and Fishing (IEP, 1981) and Estructuras andinas del poder. Ideología religiosa y política [Andean Structures of Power: Religious and Political Ideology] (IEP, 1983).
 |
