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

2: Situating Community and Landscape

2 SITUATING COMMUNITY AND LANDSCAPE In the introduction, I advocated a perspective on colonial rule as an improvised order that emerges from the everyday engagements that colonial projects require, and I argued that community and landscape constitute two primary cultural interfaces through which these collusions are negotiated. This chapter situates these concepts in three ways. Each is first defined and developed in dialogue with broader theoretical literatures of community and landscape. This discussion builds toward a practice-oriented approach that focuses on the recursive relationships between what people do on a day-today basis and the schema and resources that emerge from and structure those practices. Second, each is situated within the context of the late prehispanic and early colonial Andean highlands and, third, within the specific context of the Colca Valley. Since an emplaced perspective is central to the study, the chapter closes with a discussion of the spatial analytic framework used in the chapters that follow. Community as Interface It would seem that such an intuitively important unit of social organization as “community” would have been the object of sustained scrutiny among archaeologists, but perhaps because of its seemingly self-evident status as a social fact, community until recently had remained undertheorized, usually coincidingwiththe“site”(KolbandSnead1997).Recentdebate(bothwithin archaeology and the ethnographic literature) has made such unspoken assumptions untenable, opening doors to new modes of analysis. The debate over community has wide implications because in many ways it reflects on broader debates over the ontological and epistemological status of culture as an object and construct of anthropological knowledge. As the culture concept—especially as an orderly, shared, enduring system—was subjected to sustained interrogation through the 1980s and 1990s, culture came to be Situating Community and Landscape 23 viewed as ever-emergent and contingent on the continuous negotiation of power. In similar fashion, theories of community as the “natural,” taken-forgranted , and harmonious supra-household unit of social reproduction have undergone intense scrutiny. But behaviorist approaches to community still remain widely influential within archaeology, both on theoretical and methodological grounds. Much as in the case of “chiefdoms” (see Whitehead 1998a), a preoccupation with the supposed limits of archaeological data—particularly with correlates, units, and scales appropriate to “community”—has tended to shape research frameworks.Althoughthoseapproachescontributedmuchtorigorousmethodologies , they have left the concept of community itself underdeveloped— as simply a behavioral outcome of habituated interaction. That is, the “quality of distinctiveness” (Redfield 1955, as cited in Kolb and Snead 1997:611) of community identity is often considered epiphenomenal to conditioned behavior—to the everyday interactions of living and laboring in a bounded and defined space (for critique, see Isbell 2000; Wolf 1956). Such approaches consider community as the “natural,” fundamental unit of supra-household social and biological reproduction, produced by co-residence, proximity, and shared economic/ecological praxis (e.g., Murdock 1949; Redfield 1955, 1956). Some archaeologists have recently advocated this framework as the most pragmatic and testable approach to reconstructing and comparing prehistoric community organization (Kolb and Snead 1997; Peterson and Drennan 2005). But to say that “our focus here is on behavior, not beliefs” in the archaeological study of community organization (Peterson and Drennan 2005:5) is to assume that the two can be examined as separate variables—an assumptionhardlywarranted inlightoffivedecades of practice theory and its exploration of the recursive relationships between practice, beliefs, subjectivity , and social forces. My approach builds on practice-oriented frameworks, which posit that communities are socially constructed arrangements that structure and are structured by supra-household interactions (for a review of this and other approaches , see Yaeger and Canuto 2000). A practice-based approach requires anempiricallyrobustfoundationofsystematicallycollecteddata.Likebehaviorist approaches, it is fundamentally empirical because its objects of analysis are what people do and how they do it (Pauketat 2001). The difference is that practice theory does not assert what people do is only a conditioned response but is, rather, a negotiated outcome between agents and the structures that enable and constrain their actions. I thus conceive of communities as emergent matrices of social interaction that both create and emerge from a sense of common interest and affiliation—a sense of shared identity. In this 24 Negotiated Settlements sense, community can be seen as a primary sociocultural interface, whether at the scale of daily practice of interacting households or the less frequent (but often ideologically freighted) collective actions of larger affiliations. As such, it was a key interface for the improvisation of colonial order...