For my research I’m looking for evidence of exploitation and theft of indigenous South American spirituality and cultures other than Aztec and Mayan; it is not much to find on the net or books, or I'm not searching correctly.
Good luck to you! When I first joined this forum I read alot of the threads and being of Bolivian descent myself it stuck in my head seeing these issues mentioned here a couple times. You could try searching by checking out the posts of a former poster who was active here a few years ago named
Kantuta, who was Bolivian but lived somewhere in Scandinavia at the time. She is on pg 15 of the "member introductions" page.
There's quite a few people posing as Inca or "Inka" healers, as they insist on spelling it. Also look for people claiming to be "Andean" healers.
Al, I agree that it's almost guaranteed that traditional healers don't travel or work with people from outside their communities, and that would be the first tip-off, LOL
But in general, I'm not sure what you can tell about someone's identity from their spelling, or using the label "Andean" or "Andino." I think there isn't really an agreed-on orthography for Quechua and Aymara words so "k" and "c" often seem to be used interchangeably. Another point would be that "Inca" refers to the pre-contact civilization and its rulers. Nowadays people would identify themselves as of the Quechua ethnicity. I think you're prob right that a person usually wouldn't call themselves "Andino," but certainly they might term their culture, music, or food that way. I mean, not that they wouldn't also have their own ethnicity and/or nationality. Maybe it comes from the recognition that S. America, like Africa, was carved up into separate countries by the conquistadores, rather than along existing cultural and political lines.
