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1. Introduction: From Ritual to History and Back Again, Trajectories in Research and Theory
- University of Wisconsin Press
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Chapter One Introduction From Ritual to History and Back Again, Trajectories in Research and Theory Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. -Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Around the year 1520 (a year in which the commoners of Castile's towns rose up against Charles V and burdensome aristocrats and, in the Caribbean, Cortes pursued his conquest of Mexico), the following story unfolded: An Aymara mallku named Inca Colque, hereditary lord of the diarchies Killaka, Asanaqi, Awllaka-Urukilla, and Siwaruyu-Arakapi, dispatches a group of young married men on the great Inca highway to Cusco. After formally requesting their services and entreating them with a banquet and copious libations of corn beer, he tells them that it is their turn, their mit'a, to undertake personal service to the Inca emperor. An imposing figure dressed in lavish Inca shirts laced with gold and silver threads, Inca Colque rides in a litter on the shoulders of fifty Uru retainers when he inspects his territory and people, having earned the shirts, the right to ride the litter, and the title Inca precisely for his services to the Inca empire in peace and war. Raised to the status of unu mallku, "lord of ten thousand households," Inca Colque may well 3 4 Introduction have received these honors during the Inca ruler's personal inspection tour of Qullasuyu, if not in the periodic sacrificial pilgrimage-ceremony of capac hucha, the imperial ritual of the "opulent prestation."l Having entered on good terms into a personal relationship with the Inca Huayna Capac and become a stand-in for the Inca administration as well as their "natural lord," he has become a fearful figure to his assembled people. But he is also generous, adept at transforming patrimonial gifts into an asymmetrical obligation. To the assembled group he commits his young grandson Guarache, who is to learn the imperial language, Quechua, and take up one of the duties (such as feather-worker) appropriate to noble youth in the Inca capital, joining them in the carefully orchestrated stages of their initiation as privileged future rulers. The group takes to the Inca highway, the qapaq nan ("great road" or "opulent way") that leads from the farthest corners of the realm directly to Cusco. Fed and clothed from Inca storehouses along the way and housed in Inca rest houses and supply depots at regular intervals along the road, the group wends its way on the well-made road through the territories of once-hostile neighboring groups. The group stops at the Inca administrative center of Jatun Qulla, where the memory of a great pre-Inca warrior-mallku lives on, notwithstanding his transformation after defeat by the Inca into the leather of a ritual drum on which the meter of Inca epics is now banged out. Greeted with welcome food and drink and shown to their night's quarters, the group moves directly to the great hall facing the town's large plaza. Great numbers of corn beer storage jars draw their attention, before Inca priests begin to serve them large cups of the refreshing but intoxicating beverage. When each one is handed a ceramic beaker, painted with scenes from the mythic past, he is told to which wak'a he should dedicate the drink. After many commensal toasts, each one has recalled a genealogy of the gods that interweaves their own, local past with that of the ruling Inca. In the morning, they will continue on the way to Cusco, the Inca "world navel," where they will participate in more religious rites at the very center of the Inca empire. Through them, they will learn the imperial ritual calendar enacted in lyric song-dances and sacrifices at wak'a shrines along ceque lines. Dancing along ritual paths that radiate through the Cusco valley from the...