Since the end of the civil war, the diocese of Abancay in the south-central Peruvian Andes has produced a clergy made up entirely of men born and raised in the diocese where they now work. Yet, ironically, this diocese was specifically criticized by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for its lack of engagement with local Andean populations. Abancay is a politically and theologically conservative diocese strongly influenced by the Opus Dei bishop who trained this generation of native clergy, but it is also a diocese in the process of forging a new relationship between Andeanness and institutional Catholicism.Desde el final de la guerra civil, la diócesis de Abancay, en los Andes peruanos del centro-sur, ha producido un clero formado exclusivamente por hombres nacidos y criados en la diócesis donde trabajan actualmente. Sin embargo, irónicamente, esta diócesis fue criticada específicamente por la Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación por su falta de compromiso con las poblaciones andinas locales. Abancay es una diócesis política y teológicamente conservadora fuertemente influenciada por el obispo perteneciente al Opus Dei que formó a esta generación de clérigos nativos, pero también es una diócesis en el proceso de forjar una nueva relación entre la identidad andina y el catolicismo institucional.

The development of a native clergy in the Andes has long been called for but only recently achieved. Drawing from archival and ethnographic data, this article sets out how intercultural prejudice and discrimination have served to prevent the ordination of native Andeans. In the early colonial period, doubts about the authenticity of Andean conversion to Catholicism were rooted in mainstream Spanish skepticism of and disdain for Andean culture; in the modern day, these same prejudices continue, meaning it is only within the last fifty years that a native clergy has developed in the southern Andes, in the Peruvian diocese of Abancay, as the result of the concerted efforts of its second bishop. Today, Abancay boasts its first generation of native clergy, made up entirely of men who were born and raised in the diocese in which they now serve, and which promises a new, more empathetic institutional relationship between what it has historically meant to be Andean and what it has meant to be Catholic.

According to some recent analyses, the ethnographic encounter takes place between a complicit, colonialist, white discipline and “natives” who are colonized and implicitly nonwhite. But by insisting that anthropology is an inherently white discipline, such binary frameworks ultimately recenter Westernness and whiteness, reinforcing the centrality of Western and white anthropology. In doing so, they conflate phenotypic and structural whiteness, flatten out how anthropological whiteness compels nonwhite bodies to adopt a white habitus, and obfuscate the shifting, unstable role played by phenotype in this process. For anthropologists of color, even those born and trained in the West, the whiteness of anthropology is variable, context‐dependent, and unevenly distributed. This is illustrated with vignettes from ethnographic work in Peru, a country where racialization has typically been framed in terms of a white‐indigenous binary, and as operating like class rather than determined through descent or phenotype. [race, whiteness, ethnography, Asian American, Peru, Andes]