Ports of Entry:

Introduction to the section on travels in Peru:

The plane trip is only six hours from Atlanta to Lima, due south. Lima is like any large city anywhere, but Cusco, only a few hours plane ride from Lima is another world. Landing in Cusco is a step into indigenous culture; it is a place where the ancient traditions of non-Western religion, medicine, poetry, culture and language have managed to survive and are now experiencing a rebirth. It is an exotic flower that had been trammeled underfoot by Western Christian European/American imperialism for hundreds of years but due in part to its remoteness and to the sheer persistence of cultural traditions it has survived and has now in the past twenty years been able to resurface to openly celebrate the ancient ceremonies, healing practices and other old ways. After nearly five hundred years of suppression the trend has finally begun to shift such that foreigners are no longer coming only to practice cultural genocide and economic exploitation but rather to gain access to the spiritual traditions and show respect to the old ways.

The Protestants and Catholics and even the Mormons, along with the forces of capitalism and modernity ,are clashing with traditional cultures in every remote corner of the world. The Protestant “great commission” would happily wipe out all vestiges of traditional tribal non-Christian religion and forces of democratic capitalism would market a money economy with satellite television to every village.

Yet in the face of five hundred years of brutal armed repression and hundreds of years of attempted acculturation there still remain a few places like Cusco and the highlands of Peru where traditional ways are still alive, where contact can be made. The values of Western democratic urban capitalist money economy and Christian spirituality is so remote from the indigenous agrarian tribal barter economy and pantheistic religious village traditions that only a traveler who can stand above his or her own prejudices and cultural values can move smoothly in this terrain. To go to these places is a challenging test of your ability to move into that space where we are all the same human being, to accept the diversity of human culture and find the space inside yourself where all cultures and traditions are ornaments of human awareness worn by different people in different historic and geographic locations. Travel in itself reveals human nature, reveals the plasticity of human nature as it manifests across time and space in the incredible variety of cultures, religions and languages.

From this chauvinistic point of view only those people who adopt “my” values are really human beings. Once this attitude is endemic then there are just two basic strategies in regards to indigenous cultures: either kill them off or assimilate them. So it is only in the most remote areas of the world that traditional non-Western values have managed to survive and this is one of them. There are over a hundred communities in Peru that are above 14,000 feet. This has provided a place where non-Western indigenous traditions survive. So there are, around the globe, small pockets where indigenous culture is still alive and flourishing. And now, as there always have been, there are travelers who seek out these places and find a sort of “homecoming” in being able to contact and communicate with these cultures. It is not only a lesson in the diversity and plasticity of human nature but also a return to a type of cultural experience that was once at the root of the historical lineage of each of us. A remembrance that it was only a matter of some generations ago that our own ancestors lived in a tribal cultural with a non-Christian, non-Western, non- capitalistic way of life.