Suchergebnisse

This essay argues that Andean mountains have not always embodied indigenous sovereignty as they do today. The lordly titles that mountains now bear were, until the second half of the colonial period, held by ancestral mummies and living indigenous political authorities in a previous configuration of power. Case studies show how that earlier regime "returned to the earth", a development which eventually led to the rise of mountains as sovereign entities. This essay explores the processes by which this complex transition occurred and emphasizes the insurrections of 1780-4, which replaced the earlier regime with a more democratic community-based authority, to which modern mountain lords correspond.

The Inka state was gendered in complex and apparently contradictory ways. In military contexts, it became masculine, emphasizing conquest us the basis of men's individual matrimonial claims and the Inka sovereign's right to "give" them women. However, in its civilian tributary system, the Inka state assumed a female guise, providing food, drink, and clothing to dependent tributaries as an expression of its political‐economic power, according to the Andean idiom of mink a. By extending Collier and Rosaldo's notion of brideservice. this paper explores how these "opposed" genderings of the Inka state actually implied each other and formed a single complex, [gender, consumption, labor, state. Andes]

There is a strange and unacknowledged paradox in the historiography of the Incas. On the one hand, few would deny that theirs was a typically theocratic archaic state, a divine kingship in which the Inca was thought to.be the son of the Sun. On the other hand, the standard descriptions of Inca political structure barely mention religion and seem to assume a formal separation between state and cult.1I believe that these secularizing accounts are misguided and will show in this essay that the political structure of the pre-Columbian Andes took form primarily around a system of sacred ancestral relics and origin points known generically ashuacas. Each huaca defined a level of political organization that might nest into units of a higher order or subdivide into smaller groupings. Collectively they formed a segmentary hierarchy that transcended the boundaries of local ethnic polities and provided the basis for empires like that of the Incas. However, these huacas were also the focus of local kinship relations and agrarian fertility rituals. The political structure that they articulated therefore had a built-in concern for the metaphysical reproduction of human, animal, and plant life. Political power in the pre-Columbian Andes was particularly bound up with attempts to control the flow of water across the frontier of life and death, resulting in no clear distinction between ritual and administration.