MOCHE: A PERUVIAN COASTAL COMMUNlTi'— GILLIN 



151 



washed or destroyed. Frequently dogs bark inex- 

 plicably in the night, a sign that the ghost is returning 

 to its former habitation. Persons out in the dark are 



occasionally troubled by whisperings, nudgings, and 

 odd sounds, which are attributed to the disembodied 

 spirits still extant in the neighborhood. 



THE CULTURAL POSITION OF MOCHE 



THE COXXEPT OF THE CREOLE CULTURE 



There is a romantic appeal in considering Moche a 

 living museum of the ancient culture of the Mochicas, 

 a culture which was developed in this very region and 

 which, as we have seen, came to an end, according 

 to the most conservative estimates, not less than 900 

 years ago. It is true that Moche, like every other 

 healthy society, is not a static structure as of today 

 only. Its culture is in part the product of its history. If 

 we consider the historical aspects, the past, we are at 

 once convinced that the present-day culture of Moche 

 is a composite, a conglomerate or fabric, as you wish, 

 composed of elements derived from many sources, 

 some of them now almost unrecognizable. And 

 among the contributions out of the past, those of the 

 Mochicas are undoubtedly of considerable importance. 



However, if Moche's culture is a product of its his- 

 tory, it is no less the foundation of its future. It 

 seems that we shall be more realistic if we regard 

 Moche, not as a survival from antiquity, but as one 

 of the seedbeds from which is growing the new Pan- 

 Peruvian or Creole culture, the culture of today and 

 tomorrow, which characterizes a nation of living 

 human beings seeking and finding a place in the world 

 community. I submit that, taken as a whole, the 

 mode and organization of life in Moche at present is 

 more characteristic of this new synthesis than of any 

 of its ancestral sources in their functioning forms. 



I do not believe that we are jousting with straw 

 men when we say that one of the reasons for the 

 failure of North Americans to understand completely 

 the Latin Americans is our failure to recognize or 

 identify properly the cultures of Latin America as 

 cultures in their own right. Our tendency and that 

 of most Europeans has been to identify the modern 

 way of life either with some indigenous configura- 

 tion or with European civilization in one or other of 

 its European national traditions. We have persisted 

 in seeing the Latin Americans either as latter-day 

 Indians with an imjxjverished native culture or as 

 tainted Iberians fumbling with the traditions of Spain 

 and Portugal. It is as if, since an "angel food" cake 

 contains appreciable amounts both of eggs and of 

 sugar, we should refuse to recognize it as an anwl 



food cake, but insist on considering it cither an omelet 

 or a chunk of candy. 



The new culture, for want of a better name, may be 

 called Creole (criollo). Since the early days of the 

 colonization, this term has signified a mode of life 

 and a type of person of Spanish antecedents, in part, 

 but developed in and as a product of the New World. 

 It seems to be a better term to apply to culture than 

 the word "Mestizo," which implies racial mixture. 

 Although genetic hybridization has everywhere paral- 

 leled the development of the Creole culture, it is not 

 a necessary cause for the latter, and the use of the 

 term "Mestizo" tends to confuse biological and cul- 

 tural processes. At present, some pure Indians on the 

 one hand and some pure' whites on the other hand, 

 as well as most Mestizos, participate in the develop- 

 ment and performance of the Creole culture, and 

 there is no reason to believe that biological mixture 

 does or will proceed at the same rate as cultural mix- 

 ture and development. In fact, most of the indica- 

 tions are that the Creole culture, at the present time, 

 is growing toward an integrated configuration more 

 rapidly than the Mestizo race. 



The Creole cultures of Spanish America (leaving 

 Brazil out of consideration for the moment) have a 

 common general framework and a common tone which 

 enables them to be spoken of collectively as the Creole 

 culture and to be compared with the North American 

 culture, for example. The similarities in the cul- 

 tures are apparently due to the Spanish elements 

 which are common to their composition and which 

 were involved in their development during three cen- 

 turies or so under Spanish Colonial control. Thus all 

 are nominally Catholic and many of the details of 

 content and organization are those of Iberian Catholi- 

 cism as distinguished from the North European t3'pe. 

 Of course, the Spanish language itself with sundry 

 modifications has become part of the Creole culture. 

 Ideologically, the Creole culture is humanistic, rather 

 than puritanical, if such a contrast is permissible. 

 Intellectually, it is characterized by logic and dialec- 

 tics, rather than by empiricism and pragmatics ; the 

 word is valued more highly than the thing ; the man- 

 ipulation of symbols (as in argument) is more culti- 



