Much like in Malcolm Gladwell's acclaimed podcast series, tour guides in Peru engage in revisionist history when showing tourist audiences the ruins of Inca societies, and their narratives about the Incas and the colonizing Spaniards reveal important cultural rifts in Peruvian society. By mandate from the Peruvian cultural ministry, tours around certain sacred Inca sites must be accompanied with a certified tour guide, and this provision ostensibly provides a unified account of the Incan and colonial history relating to Peru's most iconic archaeological sites. However, many tour guides allow personal biases and outdated information to mix with historically accurate narratives, and this means that informed tourists should use research from Peruvian and foreign sources to get a more accurate picture of Andean history. While it may seem insulting to impose outside research on the lived experiences of tour guides, these individuals can show revisionist attitudes toward ancient Inca society that is inaccurately aligned to Western cultural and religious practices.
During our class's trip to Machu Picchu, our assigned tour guide was quick to suggest outlandish theories about the site's origins, purpose, and construction that contradicted the academic consensus surrounding these famed ruins. For example, he denied the Inca history of human sacrifice, proposed untrue similarities between Inca religions and Catholicism, and left open the possibility of extraterrestrial involvement in the site's construction. Even though much of this information was fabricated on the spot and shouldn't be taken too seriously, our tour guide showed a clear pattern of imposing Western religion and modern cultural norms onto a society that went extinct nearly 500 years ago. Since many tour guides descend from Quechua-speaking communities that persist in the Andean mountains, they sometimes convey information that aims to present Inca society in a more positive light - this inevitably results in a representation of their ancestors in a modern context that is unfounded in academic and archaeological research. While our tour guide portrayed Machu Picchu as an ancient university, we know that Incas did not construct universities or teach at formalized institutions resembling modern schools. By putting ancient Inca society on par with modern universities, this narrative presents a colonialist attitude that imposes Western education models on a society that never practiced them in the first place.
The spectacular views of the site and the marvel of Inca engineering speak for themselves, and a tour of this site is worthwhile regardless of the level of academic engagement you seek. Although many tour guides in Peru don't offer information suited for academic journals, their input on famed Incan archaeological sites provides a window into the psyche of rural communities surrounding these sites. Our tour guide imposed modern educational practices (and Catholic religious practices) on the Incas who lived and worked at Machu Picchu to defend the legacy of his ancestors, even if his commentary had no real basis in scientific research. Tour guides display an undeniable ancestral pride when speaking about Inca societies, but this pride can escape the bounds of the historical record. For future tourists visiting Machu Picchu, I advise you to take in the site's incredible construction and engineering and to respect your guide's perspective as someone who grew up in the surrounding area. For greater depth of explanation, defer to a peer-reviewed guidebook.
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