A translation of Colnot's article is worth posting. Bolding is mine.
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Westerners have begun to hear about the qeros by the Peruvian anthropologist Juan Nuñez del Prado. This is the son of Oscar Nuñez del Prado, himself an anthropologist, illustrious father who discovered the "last descendants of the Incas" in the mid-fifties of the last century. But these are actually one of the many hybrid expressions of this descent. Thanks to - or because of - Juan Nuñez del Prado, many misconceptions are now circulating about the qeros.
The qeros do not live above 5000 meters altitude. They did not live in isolation for 500 years, far from settlers from Europe. Their religion is besides an Andean Catholicism , strongly tinged with paganism. Many of them bear very Christian names. The Qeros never prophesied 2012 nor any type of ascension to the higher spheres of unconditional love. Nor did they predict that the whites would take over to teach the Andean science of energy to the world (what arrogance!). The qeros are not the last incas nor the last aylluInca and there are many others (in the regions of Ayacucho, Huancavelica, Apurimac, Arequipa, Cusco ... to speak only of Peru). The qeros have not kept intact the purity of the Inca blood. The qeros are not the descendants of the Incas of Vilcabamba. The qeros do not devote themselves to shamanism or the permanent culture of the energetic body. In comparison with other Andean cultures, they do not distinguish themselves as being more talented in this matter. Qeros do not deliver messages to humanity. They do not promote spiritual tourism. They do not send anyone on a mission to the West to teach subtle energy techniques. The qeros do not know anything about the "prophecy of the Andes" and other tartuferies. Recall in passing that the Inca culture It is not 100,000 years old or 20,000 years old, and was one of the shortest (three centuries maximum) as well as the last of a long series of extraordinary civilizations. All that revolves around the qeros is therefore only a New Age construction, made at their expense.
At the origin of the energetic techniques claiming the qeros, Juan Nuñez del Prado has only dubbed Quechua words on concepts already used by the new world religion, in order to propose them as so many new lucrative, on the international market for personal development. One of her most famous disciples is Elizabeth Jenkins , who in 2007 had written two books on the subject ( The Return of the Inca and Journey to Q'eros ), without ever having set foot in South America or met with interested.
Needless to say, the Indians do not see the shadow of a centavo of the huge amounts of money generated by these activities (very developed in the Scandinavian countries, England, Germany, USA, Canada and Belgium). .. or so little. All these funds benefit the creators and animators of the system, the teachers who teach these methods, the centers that host them, and the tourism agencies and other middle-class people who now organize mystical journeys to Peru, where European visitors will indeed meet with qeros - but briefed, restrained and underpaid by their employers - without ever truly sharing authentic indigenous culture. On this occasion, the q ' what " anthropologists ", creators of the system, told them to tell. Sometimes even, these qeros are so doubtful that they hold a mystical discourse that some machines can now reproduce without difficulty.
All this is supported by the Peruvian government, which sells its Andean heritage in the form of neo-Incaism, after having almost destroyed that of its psychedelic Amazon. Recall that the Peruvian state continues to be a colonial institution that makes little of its Indians and sees in their mythical image that the promise of benefits that these frauds report. As Jacques Galinier and Antoinette Molinié point out, " In national ideology, nothing is further from the State Indian claimed by the neo-Inca of Cuzco than the sociological Indian considered degenerate and archaic. real misery of a mythical prestige as the other "( the new Indian , p. 214).
The point common to all these attitudes is an obvious schizophrenia, similar to that of Perenco who makes believe that she saves what she is actually destroying. In marketing terms, this smoothing of appearances is also called "image buying". I also recall that some neo-mechanical foundations , or even some French NGOs, also work like that. They claim to work for the preservation of cultures that they say they love, but whose contents make them indifferent to the point of substituting them, of standardizing them and even of ignoring them.
Questioned on this point, these institutions are content to answer that they have no reason to have a conscience instead of Westernized Peruvians who are lacking. In short, since the others cultivate this approach little looking, let's do the same but show the opposite. Then, the example of the shaman who speaks on the phone with the spirits, it shows well that the culture of a people is not worth being perpetuated or respected, since anyway "it works". And above all, "it pays". But who? Let us content ourselves with the most degenerative versions and make our model of them, rather than patiently questioning the luminous traces of the many ancestors. We are, by this means, at least some of to obtain a "shamanism" of the third millennium of the best quality ... that, very spiritual, which corresponds to us. But back to our qeros....
