In Pursuit of the Sacred: Understanding Inka Colonialism in the Andes (original) (raw)
2020, Comparativ 30(3/4)
The Inka Empire, or Tawantinsuyu, was the largest ancient empire in the Americas. During the fifteenth century and the first decades of the sixteenth century, the Inkas managed to conquer vast regions of the South American Andes, subduing a variety of groups and polities. But the Inkas did not expand their realm for the sole purpose of extracting resources and accumulating wealth. To various degrees, they developed a colonial project that aimed at reshaping the political, economic, cultural and religious institutions and practices of the colonized. There is no doubt that Inka colonialism involved, among other things, corvée labour, the strategic relocation of people(s) and the exploitation and production of staple crops and luxury goods. Nevertheless, we argue in this paper that, above all, the Inkas expanded into the Andean region to meet and relate to the Sacred. Inka expansionism was a sort of religious quest through which the Inkas built up their authority and legitimized their rule.
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Legibility and Empire: Mediating the Inka Presence in Huarochirí Province, Peru
Ph.D. Dissertation, 2019
This dissertation investigates local community experiences of Inka imperialism between the 15th and 16th centuries t in the central highlands of Peru. It builds on studies of Inka imperialism in the province, with a focus on social practices and rituals of a community among the Yauyos people of Huarochirí Province (modern Lima Department). My theoretical framework builds on the concept of legibility from James Scott’s book, “Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed” (1998). In this view, states need to eliminate diversity and variability among their subjects in order to establish successful standardized polices. As one aspect of Scott’s model, legibility is the process through which states build an overarching and simplifying view of their subjects. The politics between empire and local subjects thus rest on the quality and depth of knowledge that states have of local practices, which in turn determine the degree of investment and cost-efficiency of the state in a specific area, and the negotiation of power dynamics between both parties. In Huarochirí, I examine a continuous process of mediation of the Inka state’s prerogative to bureaucratize and reduce local variation in social practices and institutions with the deeply embedded practices of local peoples. My central argument is that the use of familiar cultural practices by the Inka to mediate, if not control, their expanding empire also created the social spaces for local polities to maintain, formalize, and, at times, expand their own cultural practices and traditions. Through a detailed analysis of Huarochirí’s unique colonial documentary corpus, combined with archaeological reconnaissance and excavation, my dissertation provides a history of the Inka and their subjects from a local perspective rather than through the lenses of official state history as filtered through the perspectives of Spanish colonial actors.
Society for American Archaeology, 2018
Andean archaeology consistently uses the Spanish colonial written record as a guide in interpreting the characteristics of the different societies that fell under the Inka rule. However, a growing body of scholarship on the material culture of such incorporated societies shows that the nature of their relationship with the Empire was variable, and that Inka control was not territorially continuous. One key strategy through which the Inka incorporated these groups was the entangling and capture of their local religious practices with those of the official state cult. In this paper, I propose to flip this model and ask how local polities interpreted the Inka within their own memory and history. In other words, what were the narratives that some of these polities spin to define their own standing within the Empire? I focus on the Yauyos people from the highlands of Lima, Peru. Through and archaeological and historical analysis, I argue that local rituals and spaces served as the critical medium through which the Yauyos defined their own interpretation of the Inka and their new position within their empire, thinking of themselves as allies as of the Inka as subjected to their own local deities.
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