Negotiated Settlements: Andean Communities and Landscapes under Inka and Spanish Colonialism

Conclusion

CONCLUSION By tracing the local historical trajectory from autonomous rule through the InkaicandSpanishinvasions,thegoalofthisbookwastoprovideagrounded, emplaced perspective on the local experience of colonial rule. What comes to the fore in this perspective is the particular, irreducibly local manner in which new social orders were continuously improvised through the interfaces of community and landscape—orders in which lines of power between dominant and subordinate were not so clearly delimited. Tracing the historical arc in this manner shows in concrete terms how local peoples were quite accustomed to dealing with aggressive foreigners—not just reacting to them oppositionally, but pulling them into their own politics (to again paraphrase Ortner 1995:176–77) and all of the local categories of friction and tension that those politics entail. In the process, the institutions of Inkaic and Spanish colonialism were themselves significantly colonized. The implications are not just local. “Community” in this sense was not just an unselfconscious byproduct of habituated interaction, it was a primary currency in these politics of articulation between Inkaic and Spanish colonial projects and local peoples. “Landscape” was not only the setting in which these negotiations took place, it was an emergent property of them, as the schemas of community (e.g., in local terms: Cupi/Checa; in Inka terms: Collana, Pahana, Cayao; in Spanish terms: reducción, policia) were at once materialized in durable features and interests (fields, canals, settlements, land-tenure systems) as they acted as models for directing their ongoing constitution and maintenance. These schemas and resources together—that is, in place—constituted the “resistance of culture” (Sahlins 2005:4) with which the Inkas and the Spanish necessarily contended. Thus colonialist plans of eradication and replacement reckoned with the practical necessities of collusion and analogy. That much is the argument that ran through this book. The sections below provide a summary and synthesis of the substantive findings as they inform that argument. Conclusion 295 Community and Landscape during the LIP and Late Horizon FollowingthedeclineoftheMiddleHorizonstates,severalarchaeologicalindices from the Late Intermediate period point to a major expansion of settlement and irrigated agricultural production associated with the development of autonomous ethnic polities in the upper and lower reaches of the Colca Valley. Collagua ethnogenesis during the LIP is marked by the appearance of distinctive local domestic and mortuary architecture, extensive complexes of irrigated bench terraces surrounding settlements, and a diagnostic ceramic series of limited stylistic and formal continuity from the preceding Wari-influenced wares. While these markers suggest an overarching unity of identity among the Collaguas, I have argued that ethnic identification was not isomorphic with political organization and was likely not as important as lower-order affiliations in everyday community life. In fact, material differences between the areas later identified as “Cabana” in the lower valley versus “Collagua” in the middle and upper stretches of the valley are scant. Though comparable domestic architecture from Cabanaconde is lacking, the most marked differences relate to more noncentralized but overall more dense settlement and more intensive land-use patterns in Yanquecollaguas and Laricollaguas compared to Cabanaconde. Given the attested differences in language and mythical origins between the two groups in colonial textual sources, it is exceedingly unlikely that such ethnic distinctions did not originate in the LIP, but they were likely not as marked or as salient as they became under Inka administration. This is consistent with an emerging consensus that much of what has been imagined of the political landscape of the LIP—a balkanized landscape of consolidated ethnic señoríos—is wrong because it has been based on a retrospective projection of the outcomes of Inka imperial policies. Those policies tended to reify ethnic boundaries and the political hierarchies within them (see also Arkush 2010; Covey 2008). Ethnic identity during the LIP here and elsewhere in the highlands was probably in this sense only the most outwardly visible (Cohen’s [1985:70–75] “public face” of community) manifestation of a multiscalar, fractal-like structure of ayllu-based community identification—one compatible with Inka imperial interests (and those of favored ethnic lords) in submerging lower-order conflicts, promoting ethnic identity, and preventing higher-order, inter-ethnic alliances. As I have argued, then, autonomous political organization during the LIP in the Colca Valley was heterarchical in nature, that is, composed of internally differentiated communities whose relative political rankings and relations were fluid. On the one hand, there is strong evidence for increasing disparities of status during the LIP, such as intra- and intersite disparities in [3.145.166.7] Project MUSE (2024...