Peru

My Scholarship entry - A 'place' I have visited: The People of Cusco

PERU | Saturday, 6 July 2013 | Views [535] | View Larger Image

This young girl paused to glare at me during a morning procession of her kindergarten class (one amongst many) that paraded around the Plaza de Armas preceding the grander processions during the festival of Corpus Christi.

Tags: travel photography scholarship 2013

Early one morning at the crack of dawn, after attempting to photograph a Cusco sunrise, I spotted this man walking up the Calle Triunfo, a famous Incan stone-walled alley. It was in this moment that I began to see how the Andean people navigate (literally and figuratively) the ancient and modern aspects of their city.

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A group of men struggle under the weight of a saints' effigy as they carry it through the streets of Cusco and around the Plaza de Armas, during the festival of Corpus Christi. They will do this all day and into the night when they will store the effegies until morning in La Catedral, a Spanish colonial cathedral, which you can see behind them. Celebrated exactly nine weeks after Easter, it is a ritual co-opted by the Spanish in the 16th Century to Catholicize the Incan people. The effigies are treated as living beings in a similar way as the Inca paraded their ancestors' mummies around that same plaza centuries before.

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Peru

My Scholarship entry - A 'place' I have visited: The People of Cusco

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