Reading Inca History

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments This project has been a long time in coming. It began with my first exposure to interpretations of the Inca past. Almost the first thing I read was María Rostworowski’s monograph on Pachacuti, and ever since I have been looking for different points of view within the dynastic descent group itself. There never was agreement on “what happened” in the Inca past, not even among the Incas. At the time, I was studying anthropology with John Howland Rowe, who combines history and archaeology in his own work and who could compare the physical remains of the Inca empire to the representations of it that were collected from Inca sources in Cuzco and find a resonance between them. At the same time, Rowe treated the Spanish narratives as problematic, for, of course, an anthropologist knows that the Spaniards were not in Cuzco doing ethnography, and what they wrote does not reflect more than a superficial knowledge of the rules and practices of the people with whom they lived. Still, the Spanish authors—and the native Andeans who wrote Spanish narratives — captured Inca genres, and these genres reflect the Inca past in some way. Rowe has written mainly about the Incas, not about how we work or about the sources through which we study the Incas, even though he has generated his own source criticism and worked within this personal body of knowledge. Perhaps he made a mistake in not writing more about the Spaniards , just as it may be a mistake to attempt a study like this without more knowledge about how Spanish authors worked. I would argue that the attention paid to Spanish authors has far outweighed what has been given to Inca sources and that these sources are deserving of attention. My greatest intellectual debt in this enterprise is to Rowe, although the scholarly efforts of people like María Rostworowski, Franklin Pease, John Murra, and Tom Zuidema have clearly stimulated the thinking which underlies the present work. Some of the material in chapters 5 and 6 was published in an essay on the Incas, published as Die Inka by C. H. Beck in Munich (1998), and I thank the publishers for permission to publish in English. I also thank the Humboldt Foundation for a research fellowship that allowed me to spend two years at the Seminar für Völkerkunde of the University of Bonn. Near the beginning of my tenure in Bonn (a stay that lengthened to five years), a group of students, including Kristina Angelis, Bärbel Konerman, and Gerlinde Pilgrimm, asked me questions about the social organization of Cuzco and how to read what had been written about it. These interests led to a seminar in which the present work germinated. One of the students, Alexander Voss, was assigned a paper on Inca genealogy. He avidly traced all the contradictions in the various accounts of Inca genealogy, making me aware, as I never had been before, of how controversial a subject dynastic descent actually was. During this time I was the recipient of a voluminous correspondence from John Rowe on a variety of matters related to the present work. I had more contact with him on these matters than I had had on my dissertation, despite being an ocean away. I owe this book to the fertile period I spent in Bonn. The time I spent abroad was also intellectually stimulating because of the many encounters I had with colleagues. The list would be long were I to mention everyone, but I will mention some, including Ute Baumgart, Michael Tellenbach, Eva König, Antonio Nodal, Wiebke Ahrndt, Martin Volland, Albert Meyers, Heiko Prümers, Roswith Hartmann, Vera Stähle, Christine Scholten, and, particularly, Sabine Dedenbach-Sálazar Sáenz, Hanns Prem, Kristina Angelis, and Kerstin Nowack. Moreover, the Bonn seminar was graced by the presence of Luis Lumbreras and Marcela Rios for an entire year while I was there. Rossana Barragán and David Pereira were there for some of that time. A little-known fact is that I was one of the greatest beneficiaries of these arrangements. I spent time visiting colleagues who influenced or contributed to this work in one way or another. I especially want to recall Fermín del Pino, Juan José Villarías, Frank Meddens, Marius Ziolkowski, and Inge Schjellerup. Spain is a point of reunion for Andeanists who work in archives, and I was fortunate to cross paths with Jorge Flores...