Territories configured in the Ayacucho department at the beginning of the twentieth century: the “remote” provinces and the Quechua Indigenous otherness

Abstract

This article intends to examine, from the territory conceptual perspective, the changes operated in the Andean department of Ayacucho, at the beginning of the XX century. We propose to build up a more complex concept with the Social Sciences contribution, introducing symbolic dimensions, in which: The provinces are seen as the “far” and the “near” ones with respect to the Huamanga center; The economic flows produce articulations and disarticulations in the department territory and the imagined physical and evolutive “distances” separate the “far” provinces from Modernity. It also considers the social order that subscribes a racialist discourse in which a “territory” of the otherness is represented. This “place” is, in fact, a spatialized time, where the Indigenous people live: a “back” time and a place other than the contemporary world.