Quechua

Quechua names both a family of Andean languages and the peoples who speak them, and the two are not the same thing. The family was already spread along the Andes before the Inca, whose state adopted a variety of it as an administrative language and carried it well beyond its earlier range. Willem Adelaar and Pieter Muysken's survey sets out the internal divisions, which are wide enough that speakers of the northern and southern branches cannot understand one another.

The colonial church extended it further still. Quechua was treated as a general language for missionary use, catechisms, confession manuals and sermon collections were printed in it from the sixteenth century, and priests were required to learn it, so a Christian vocabulary was built inside the language. That is why Quechua words for sin, soul and prayer are a mixture of borrowed Spanish and repurposed Andean terms, and the repurposing carried older meanings along with it.

After the Tupac Amaru rebellion of 1780 the colonial authorities moved against the language, and against Inca dress and titles with it. It survived in the countryside, and it is spoken today by several million people, with official standing in Peru and Bolivia and a growing written literature of its own.

Quechua speaking communities carry the Andean religious framework into the present. Catherine Allen's ethnography of one such community describes the daily texture of it: coca leaves shared before work and before any request is put, offerings made to the earth, Pachamama, and to the mountain lords, and a running attention to reciprocity between people, land and the dead. Gary Urton's work on cosmology records the sky read as part of the same order rather than as a separate subject.

The ayllu, the descent group holding land in common with obligations to its ancestors, remains a functioning institution in many places, and collective labour, called mink'a or ayni depending on its form, is the everyday shape of the same reciprocity.

None of this stands outside Catholicism. Quechua communities are largely Catholic, and increasingly also Evangelical, and the fiesta system, the brotherhoods, the pilgrimages and the mountain shrines carry both vocabularies at once. The pilgrimage to Qoyllur Rit'i, which draws tens of thousands to a glacier below a Catholic sanctuary, is the clearest case, and it has become an argument in its own right as the ice retreats and the customary cutting of blocks from it has been stopped. The atlas records the practice as living and changing rather than as a survival.