Quechua religious terms in the departments of Apurimac and San Martin, Peru

Abstract

My thesis "Quechua Religious Terms in the Departments of Apurimac and San Martin, Peru" deals with the problem of changing meaning-loads of Quechua religious terms. I chose the departments (counties) of Apurimac and San Martin as representative of a montana (jungle) and sierra (mountain) Quechua culture respectively. The purpose of the thesis is to show though the analysis from a corpus of one hundred and thirty-two terms that Quechua religious terms still carry much of tine nearing load they had before the Spanish conquest despite more than four hundred years of religious and other cultural pressures. This study also highlights the difficulties and unresearched areas in the fields of dialectology and folklore of the Quechua culture, a culture that is still very much the life of some ten million people in Latin America today.