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To Feed and Be Fed

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Figures and Tables............................................................................ixAcknowledgments.......................................................................................xi1. A Personal Odyssey.................................................................................1Part I. Sovereignty2. El Cuzco: A Reconsideration of Sovereignty, Territoriality, and the Inca State.....................13Part II. Divine Rulership3. Kingship and the Gods..............................................................................594. To Feed and Be Fed: Curacal Legitimacy and Cosmology...............................................113Part III. The Practice of Cosmological Power5. Rites of Rule......................................................................................157Part IV. The Social Bases of Authority6. A Sense of Selves..................................................................................217Notes.................................................................................................237References............................................................................................297Index.................................................................................................333

Chapter One

[It has been] argued that "native" histories are mentally enigmatic to the Western observer because they respond to a cultural logic that is impenetrable to Western modes of thought. -Neil L. Whitehead

The exploration of "the other" has been a fascination and a challenge to scholars and other curious beings for centuries. This is certainly true of Western observers on the subject of the Incas and other Andean peoples since first contact. The result of both casual and intimate association has been a corpus of firsthand descriptions, what I call the classical chronicles, that inform us that the Incas had built a huge empire. At its largest the empire extended over territory that is now defined as southern Colombia; highland and coastal Ecuador and Peru; highland Bolivia; northwestern Argentina; and about half of Chile. Travel and communication throughout this landmass was facilitated by an intricate system of linked roads that went north and south in the mountains and along the coast, tied together by east-west trails through the river valleys. Messengers (chasquis) ran relay style along these highways, carrying messages and fresh fish, stopping at way stations to pass on their responsibility to another, who sprinted on to the next stop, and so forth. The Inca rulers had urban complexes built, we are told, at various spots throughout the empire: at Cuzco, considered the capital of their jurisdiction; at Hunuco Viejo; Incahuasi; Tomebamba; and elsewhere, places that the native chronicler Felipe Guamn Poma de Ayala identified as many Cuzcos. But most of the population of this multiethnic empire were peasants, who cultivated the land to produce maize, potatoes, maca, and other vegetables and fruit, and shepherded large numbers of llamas and alpacas. They also, as tribute, lent their labor to build the roads, bridges, storehouses, ceremonial centers, and irrigation canals and agricultural terraces that directly benefited themselves or others like them. Smaller numbers served as fishermen and skilled artisans and specialists. This was an organized, rationalized realm with a bureaucracy. Officials had jurisdiction over units of population, categorized according to a decimal system, beginning with units of forty thousand households and extending down to as few as five.

These early eyewitness descriptions include less information about native religion, initially, because the Spanish, confident that the Christian god had given them victory against the Moors on the Iberian peninsula and opened the Americas to them to continue to spread their faith, dismissed the Andeans as pagans and infidels whose gods were fictitious, impotent inventions and, therefore, of little importance. But short or fragmentary references to ritual, polytheism, ancestor worship, and the attendant human and other animal and plant sacrifices, even in the earliest documents, provide sound evidence that the Andean people were profoundly spiritual beings.

Given that these chroniclers rarely recorded the native voice in the first decades after the invasion and first encounters, the Spanish depictions and view became predominant. They established what amounted to a near monopoly on the selection, summation, and transmittal of information. So their view, in large part, became the basis for our views. Scholars have read, analyzed, and synthesized these mostly Spanish accounts to write myriad interpretations of various aspects of Andean civilization. William Prescott used them in the nineteenth century to produce a sweeping, aggressive history of the Incas. In the twentieth century, Heinrich Cunow used the same sources to describe this civilization, in whole or in part, as a socialist paradise where the needs of all were met in a communal setting. Karl Wittfogel thought the Andean people were a good example of an oriental despotism. More recently, several authors described the Andean realm in Marxist terms.

During the last several decades, other approaches to the study of the Incas have dominated scholarly endeavors. Basing his writings on a detailed analysis and mostly literal interpretation of his sources, the archaeologist John Rowe developed what has been labeled a historicist approach in some classic articles that are often cited and are only now being, in part, revised. The anthropologist John V. Murra's political economy approach, which emphasized verticality, reciprocity, and redistribution, added new insights to sometimes ambiguous, contradictory, and hard-to-understand economic data. Finally, R. Tom Zuidema's structural interpretations, beginning with the shrine system (ceque) near the purported Inca capital, have drawn attention to rituals and belief systems. The publication and use of more localized notarial and administrative and judicial records-pioneered by Waldemar Espinoza Soriano, Mara Rostworowski, John V. Murra, Franklin Pease, and Noble David Cook-moved studies down to a more personal level, resulting in a sometimes daily and more intimate glimpse of an active population. Such work showed the often large gap between imperial generalization and local, practical, semiautonomous reality.

But the secular focus continued to predominate, with a few recent exceptions, such as the notable essays on Andean religion of Luis Millones; subsequent publications by historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists such as Guillermo Cock Carrasco, Mary Doyle, Lorenzo Huertas, Liliana Regalado de Hurtado, Arthur Demarest, and Geoffrey Conrad; and more recently, by Peter Gose and Kenneth Mills. Many of these, to a lesser or greater extent, relied on the records of idolatry that are most abundant for the seventeenth century. It was after 1600 that the viceregal ecclesiastical establishment became aware that the native conversion to Catholicism was superficial and that elements of local cults, most dedicated to the ancestors, had survived hidden from the eyes of or with the tacit consent of Spanish authorities. Alarmed at this chilling realization, clerical judges traveled to distant settlements to survey these survivals and look underneath the thin veneer of Christianity in an effort to "know thine enemy." These tours of extirpation became one of the first systematic efforts to eliminate Andean religions. The investigators who used these local documents deepened our understanding of Andean belief systems that had eluded or been neglected by earlier generations.

In this process of writing and rewriting Andean history, scholars began to recognize that each manuscript has a perspective and conscious or unconscious objectives. Even native sources, such as those written by the Spanish-schooled Guamn Poma de Ayala and the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, must be read with caution and questioned, for peculiar to each are its own filters, biases, and goals. Gary Urton's work on Pacaritanbo (also Pacariqtambo or Pacarictambo) provides a good, accessible example at a more localized level of how to decode, appraise, and evaluate a document to better ascertain the reliability of the information it contains. Karen Powers's ingenious work on indigenous wills also comes to mind. These scholars comprehended that words cannot be taken literally, uncritically, and out of context. Meanings change over time; the same words had other connotations in other temporal and geographic settings. For instance, the field moved from thinking that the encomienda had a territorial dimension to its rightful definition of the labor obligations of a given social group; and that "tribute" in the pre-Hispanic Andes was not assessed as quantities of goods as it was under the Nahuatl-speaking Mexicas, but instead that it was measured in terms of labor service. Likewise, a structure identified as a "fortress" by sixteenth-century Spanish observers was not necessarily strictly defensive, but instead a temple and sacred precinct within sometimes labyrinthine protective walls. In other words, the world portrayed by the Spanish and Hispanicized native writers in early colonial times is not necessarily and in all aspects what their words lead us to imagine it was today.

Yet, for all the advances, many still cling to an image of an empire ruled by a king who himself had a clear order in a dynastic sequence; where primogeniture was indicated and normative, if not always the followed preference in choosing an heir; where the empire was demarcated and its far-flung corners were well connected through a series of admirably engineered roads and bridges; where an elaborate and ubiquitous bureaucracy controlled every "province"; where every person and every tribute-produced carrying cloth and tunic were counted and accounted for; and where centralization was omnipresent and inescapable. In sum, this is what we think we know about the Incas.

I write "think we know" because the records contain other problematic words, inexplicable phrases, contradictions, inconsistencies, and unexpected silences and gaps that lead me to think that we still have much to learn about native society as it existed at the time of or shortly after contact with the Europeans. For example, in the few instances where the native voice is recorded, I found phrases or statements that were intriguingly incomprehensible and obtuse at first. I happened upon two such statements researching my last book. Both pointed in the same direction. They taught me to slow down, to ponder, to imagine, to empathize, and to question the sources, my own assumptions, and the meanings of words, whose conventional, present definitions did not fit the context and circumstances in which they were used. They sent me into the archives to read and reconsider the records of idolatry. These detailed reports of religious persecution by sometimes overzealous extirpators charged first with uncovering the secret religious practices of the provincial natives, and second, with converting the practitioners, contained information on the cosmology or belief system of peasants and the organization and practice of ancestor worship, including accounts of divination and other esoteric and occult rituals. The continuities in thought and deed, between the state theater that I read about in the chronicles and the ceremonies that were still practiced among the distant rural peoples in the late sixteenth and early and mid-seventeenth centuries, helped me comprehend the words and phrases that, at first, had been beyond my understanding. In other instances, I did not find the documentation to support what I assumed to have occurred. These frustrations and appraisals pried open my own window to the past and helped me see through the filters of the Spanish and Hispanicized native writers and (more important) my own. Opening was slow and gradual; the vision was fuzzy at first. The outlines became progressively less blurry as multiple documents were found; as the various possible definitions of words were considered; and as words were compared to behavior to better envision context. I finally realized that we, in part, were the distortionists.

It is a theoretical near impossibility to totally penetrate the mind of another, especially of a person or people brought up in a different tradition. The question is how to understand the other's worldview from the outside and, then, how to translate that belief system and culture into terms that can be understood by a Western audience of one's peers. How to bridge the gap between our own and native concepts is also a challenge of modern ethnographic work. The same decentering task faces the ethnographic historian. But the task of historical anthropology is even harder than that of ethnography because scholars must rely on the reports of Europeans (or the Europeanized) who were not consciously attempting to be anthropologists but were nonetheless often trying to explain to their colleagues and superiors the native situation for their own purposes. Moreover, we cannot go back and rephrase and decenter questions to comprehend better original meanings and intent, to penetrate the sometimes hastily stated colloquialisms or idioms that are replete with assumptions about basic local lore. Therefore, investigators must excavate mentally through various layers of meanings. They must unpack the historical records that usually contain the words of Lima or provincial urban lawyers, court-appointed translators (lenguas), or officials (such as the protector of Indians), who reframe what native informants said that they thought, saw, heard, or experienced. This usually implies the translation of native words from the original languages, such as Quechua, Aymara, Mochic (or Yunga), or any of the others that were spoken in the Andes, into Spanish. We scholars, then, translate them again sometimes into English, Portuguese, German, French, Japanese, Polish, and other languages. Translations are never totally equivalent. Because the sense of words changes over time, the Spanish words used by the classic chroniclers and the translators of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries must be kept in historical context to understand their referents. Translating meaning between two cultures also involves conveying one conceptualization into terms and categories that are often foreign to the original.

Imprecision also hinders understanding. As will be shown in Chapter 2, the Spanish often used words like province without ever establishing a generic and universally accepted definition or telling us to what they precisely referred. They used a word like tierra, literally understood as "land," when they specifically referred to people or persons. Complicating things, too, were the terms native Andeans used to refer to phenomena outside their everyday experience. Like the Nahuatl speakers of central Mexico, who called Hernando Corts's boats "towers" or "houses," and horses "deer," and who also equated the Spanish to gods because their use of muskets and cannons made them think that the Spanish controlled thunder and lightning, the Andeans fit occurrences into their own cultural context as best they could. Edmundo Guilln Guilln amassed the early testimonials of Andeans showing that they called the Spanish viracochas after an all-powerful creator god. Indigenous informants elsewhere talked about planted fields (chacras). The Spanish translated the word sometimes as "lands," sometimes as "properties," not comprehending that the natives distinguished between planted land and unplanted land, and that unplanted land was not a chacra. This gave rise to debates over private property that, in the Andes, was not entirely equivalent to the Western institution before the Spanish incursion. The problem becomes one of how, if one can somehow understand them, a native mind-set and culture can be described accurately so that a Westerner can comprehend them without distortion and loss of the essence of that understanding. The challenge is to make sense of the other's world without deforming it or depicting it as a pale reflection of one's own culture.

Having worked in the northern provinces of Peru for most of my professional life, dealing with regional aspects of the local political economy and social structure-and, of late, particularly the native chiefs (curacas, caciques) and their people-I was immediately struck with the bravura and obviously exaggerated stories of the Incas portrayed in some of the chronicles, when I had the opportunity to revisit them in recent years. The vision transmitted in many of the early Spanish or Hispanicized native accounts was, it soon became clear, often a largely Europeanized, sanitized, and simplified one. Research into the authors' lives, travels, professions, the other experiences, and the motivations behind their writings by me and others taught me to be wary of their class biases and skeptical (sometimes in the extreme) of their blanket statements. Many early reports I found to be Cuzcoand Inca-centric, just like later histories of the colonial and republican eras tended to be Lima- and elite-centered. Moreover, as research into a chief and his people, or chieftainships (curacazgos, cacicazgos), brought me inevitably into the study of the relationship between local polities and the imperial state, I realized just how the Spanish cultural predilections and my own had prevented us from "seeing," just how much our upbringing and learning determined how we reconstructed the past, and just how many scholars tended to disregard native voices, even when we encountered them.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from To Feed and Be Fedby Susan Elizabeth Ramrez Copyright © 2005 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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