Reading Inca History

2. Capac

Capac All versions of the Inca past stress descent through the male line from an apical pair: Manco Capac and a sister-wife. The Spanish historical narratives of the Inca past list approximately twelve generations spanning the time from origins to the Spanish arrival. All the accounts are structured by genealogy, even when an author attempts to correlate the Andean past with calendar years or European history. Genealogy was a structuring principle familiar to Europeans, but was this structure imposed by Spaniards on narrative material that had a very different purpose in its original context, or was the genealogical structure a feature of the underlying Inca source? Clearly, the Spaniards and the native Andeans who wrote narrative accounts of the Inca past had their own purpose in mind when they sat down to write. Just as clearly, these purposes cannot explain Inca practice. If the Incas kept an account of dynastic genealogy, what Inca purpose was served? In this chapter, I will argue that the Incas kept an account of dynastic descent from Manco Capac because it was used as a reference in calculating capac status, a hereditary status that passed through the male line to each new generation of Inca brothers and sisters in the dynastic line. The status can only be imperfectly known, but clearly, both men and women were conduits for it. Because we have access to information that bears on Inca dynastic practice, it may seem that it was reckoned only by the group of people descended from Manco Capac. Certainly, they tried to make exclusive claims to capac status within the larger group of people who were Inca. At the same time, other nonInca groups are identified as capac in the Spanish historical narratives. These peoples were rivals of special importance to the Incas and will be discussed in chapter 6. The reckoning of descent was important in determining who was capac and to what degree, and this reckoning was embedded in more general practices related to affiliation. How the Incas determined who was Inca and how a person was classified within the broader group are at issue, but our approach will be to examine capac status in light of what we can glean about affiliation from early written texts, paying attention to particular instances where indi2 viduals asserted claims based on principles of descent or affiliation. The terms used to classify individuals or members of groups will enter into the analysis, although our use of them is subordinate to other approaches. Since we do not have ethnographic access to sixteenth-century practitioners, our expectation is that we will barely penetrate the conceptual universe in which these individuals operated. However, our interest is not to examine Inca practice in light of general models or even to develop a competing model but to trace the historical trajectory of capac status and understand what we can about how it was calculated.1 affiliation The Incas of Cuzco—both those who were capac and those who were not, and including both males and females—were affiliated through the male line. While the dual nature of gender was fully utilized by the Incas in systems of symbolic representation, the descendants of Manco Capac, male and female, still traced their descent through the male line to their forebear and his sisterwife .2 A woman’s sons and daughters are members of their father’s descent group. A son is churi to his father. A daughter is huarmi churi (literally, “a female churi”) or ususi to her father. In contrast, a woman’s children are huahua, the generic term for offspring used when referring to animal as well as human offspring (González Holguín [1607]; 1842: fols. 96v–97). Several terms mark membership in the descent group as well as refer to a class of relatives. One is huaoque. While it means a man’s brother or cousin, it also means a member of his descent group of the same age or older. The term pana was used by a man to refer to his sister, a cousin, or any woman of his patrilineage (González Holguín [1608]; 1952:270). Churi is the name used by men to refer to all members of their descent group younger in age than themselves . It is significant that a man called his daughter huarmi churi, which we have already noted means “female churi” (González Holguín [1608]; 1952:122, 184, 270, 359). She was...