Reading Inca History (review)

Reading Inca History. By Catherine Julien (Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2000) 338 pp. $49.95

Although scholars of the colonial Andes have long lamented the absence of intelligible pre-Hispanic texts on a par with those now central to Mesoamerican ethnohistory, there is no deficit of Inca histories penned by European elites, with the help of native informants, during the early colonial period. The trustworthiness of these accounts has often been called into question, given their deep political and personal agendas. For example, Viceroy Francisco de Toledo's historical commissions were motivated by the desire to create a hegemonic colonial state via the legitimating power of historical narrative, and Juan de Betanzos wrote, in part, to support the pretensions of his own Inca in-laws. Thus, in recent decades, historians of the colonial Andes have turned a more skeptical eye to such problematic texts about the pre-Hispanic past than have, say, structuralist anthropologists, who sometimes view them as flawed but timeless records of social organization.

Into this dilemma steps Julien, conversant with both disciplines, with a novel and provocative attempt to reconsider and energize the historical use of these colonial texts. Her project in this ambitious volume is literally to deconstruct Spanish colonial chronicles of the Inca past, emphasizing two types of sources upon which, she argues, they were based. She meticulously compares a number of chronicles to trace possible common Spanish sources, reconstructing, in a sense, some now-missing texts—like that of Cristles of the Inca past, emphasizing two types of sources upon which, she argues, they were based. She meticulously compares a number of chronicles to trace possible common Spanish sources, reconstructing, in a sense, some now-missing texts—like that on within the chronicles both to study its form and style and to "recover Inca knowledge about their past" (21-22).

Julien's method is a deep and careful comparison of parallel pass-ages in key early texts, which she likens to archaeological excava- tion. Though she may spend too much time discussing method and working through the levels of the texts, the power of her method should not be underestimated. It is particularly compelling in the context of other recent interdisciplinary work on the Andes. Niles' creative reading of monumental Inca architecture alongside chronicles and Dean's astute handling of images and texts on Corpus Christi processions stand alongside Julien's readings to provide a more complicated understanding of knowledge and power before and after the conquest.¹ Julien's book falls short of these two only in its final three chapters, which move from deconstruction to the reconstruction of a sometimes positivist and unitary "reading" of Inca history that lacks the sensitivity of her approach to Spanish sources. Surely Inca and Spanish record keepers and power mongers had more in common than Julien indicates.