Domination without Dominance: Inca–Spanish Encounters in Early Colonial Peru (review)

Modern understandings of the history of the Spanish conquest of Peru rely primarily upon chronicles written by Spaniards who participated in it. Although most historians have certainly been aware that these sources must inherently exhibit Spanish biases, for the most part they have had no way to identify or examine them in any specific way. Even modern histories of early colonial Peru, therefore, have generally accepted the version of events recorded in the sixteenth century. Drawing from current interdisciplinary trends and theoretical perspectives, Gonzalo Lamana’s book, Domination without Dominance, proposes a revisionist history of the first few decades of Spanish presence in Peru, arguing that the version of events narrated by sixteenth-century Spanish chroniclers is often at best one-sided and misleading and at worst completely false.

Lamana sets up his study in opposition to other modern scholarship, which tends to accept relatively uncritically the version of the conquest and consolidation of power appearing in colonial sources. At first, this project appears to constitute an embarrassing critique of modern scholarship. Although Lamana’s critique certainly applies to scholarship on the conquest, I would argue that the problem is not so much that recent scholarship has been negligently uncritical but rather that it has not directed its energies in this direction. It has been content to rely upon the inherited findings of earlier research on the conquest, because there was no apparent reason to go back and reexamine this work. The value of Lamana’s brilliant book demonstrates that such a reevaluation is not only productive but essential.

Lamana’s study makes both a substantive and a methodological contribution to the field of Andean studies as well as to history and ethnohistory more generally. The theoretically informed methodology involves the cross-checking and comparison of various types of archival documents and published histories and an analytical approach that draws on the findings of ethnohistorical and anthropological research. In and of itself, this is not new. The innovative nature of Lamana’s project resides in the application of this interdisciplinary methodology to a reexamination of the events of the conquest, in the importance he places on what he calls “snapshots of alterity” or, following de Certeau, “faults in the discourse of comprehension” (78) appearing in Spanish sources and largely overlooked by modern historians, and in his willingness to take seriously nativelike accounts whose eccentricities have been largely dismissed or ignored in histories of the conquest.

It is beyond the scope of this review to summarize the arguments of each chapter, but Lamana applies his methodology to various dimensions of early colonial Andean history: the encounter in Cajamarca between Pizarro and Atahualpa, the nine-month aftermath of this encounter and the ransom of Atahualpa, the three-year period leading up to Manco Inca’s rebellion in 1536, the war between Manco and the Spaniards, the institutionalization of native porters, the aftermath of Manco Inca’s war, the development of a new mestizo consciousness between 1543 and 1548, and the consolidation that took place under Pedro de la Gasca between 1548 and 1549. The analysis is all the more impressive because it relies upon specific pieces of information culled from a wide array of both published and unpublished sources.

In general terms, Lamana reveals that the Spanish version of events during the first twenty years after contact is a teleological construction ordered by the a posteriori knowledge of the outcome. Furthermore, Spanish accounts represent both their own actions and those of the Andeans as if they were both governed by the same epistemological position. Lamana’s study begins with the premise that the “faults in the discourse of comprehension” and the eccentricities of the nativelike accounts of the conquest reflect a different logic that informed the perceptions and actions of the native Andeans or, in some cases, the underlying but unstated...