Reading Inca History

by Catherine Julien

Overview

At the heart of this book is the controversy over whether Inca history can and should be read as history. Did the Incas narrate a true reflection of their past, and did the Spaniards capture these narratives in a way that can be meaningfully reconstructed? In Reading Inca History,Catherine Julien finds that the Incas did indeed create detectable life histories.

The two historical genres that contributed most to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish narratives about the Incas were an official account of Inca dynastic genealogy and a series of life histories of Inca rulers. Rather than take for granted that there was an Inca historical consciousness, Julien begins by establishing an Inca purpose for keeping this dynastic genealogy. She then compares Spanish narratives of the Inca past to identify the structure of underlying Inca genres and establish the dependency on oral sources. Once the genealogical genre can be identified, the life histories can also be detected.

By carefully studying the composition of Spanish narratives and their underlying sources, Julien provides an informed and convincing reading of these complex texts. By disentangling the sources of their meaning, she reaches across time, language, and cultural barriers to achieve a rewarding understanding of the dynamics of Inca and colonial political history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780877457978
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	02/01/2002
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	350
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.00(d)

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READING Inca HISTORY
By CATHERINE JULIEN
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS Copyright © 2000 University of Iowa Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87745-797-8



Chapter One Introduction The nobles tell very great stories about Inca Yupanqui and Topa Inca, his son, and Huayna Capac, his grandson, because these were the rulers who proved themselves to be the most valiant. Those who would read about their deeds should know that I put less in my account than I knew and that I did not add anything, because I do not have any other sources for what I write than what these Indians tell me. And for myself, I believe what they say and more because of the traces and signs left by these kings and because of their great power, which is an indication that what I write is nothing compared to what actually happened, the memory of which will endure for as long as there are native Andean people. Muy grandes cosas quentan los orejones deste Ynga Yupangue e de Topa Ynga, su hijo, e Guaynacapa, su nieto porque éstos fueron los que se mostraron más valerosos. Los que fueren leyendo sus acaeçimientos crean que yo quito antes de lo que supe que no añadir nada, y que, para afir[marlo por çierto], fuera menester verlo, ques causa que yo no afirme más de que lo escrivo por relaçión destos yndios; y para mí, creo esto y más por los rastros y señales que dexaron de sus pisadas estos reyes y por el su mucho poder, que da muestra de no ser nada esto que yo escrivo para lo que pasó, la qual memoria durará en el Perú mientras oviere honbres de los naturales. (Cieza de León [1553], chap. 48; 1986:140) Pedro de Cieza de León wrote in the early 1550s and was one of the first Spaniards to write about the Inca past in any detail. He was a soldier, but he took upon himself the task of recording what had gone on before he arrived in Peru. Most of what he wrote was about fighting among Spanish factions, but one part of his much longer work was a narrative of the Inca past, beginning with the origins of a group of siblings from a cave at Pacaritambo and extending to the time of the Spanish arrival in Cuzco, twelve generations later.

The narrative tells the story of the Inca imperial expansion. Structured by the genealogy of the dynastic line, it is peopled by the Inca rulers and their close kin. Cieza says he took all of his material from native sources. Obviously he translated-with the aid of translators-what he was told by particular individuals, since the Incas had no form of writing, and other forms of recording were unintelligible to the Spaniards. Cieza names one Inca informant, Cayo Topa ([1553], chap. 6; 1986:38), and he occasionally indicates divergent stories, so he talked to others while he was in the Andes. They could have been eyewitnesses to some of the events Cieza wrote about, but no one living could have a memory of the period before the last two, or possibly three, generations.

Cieza recovered some kind of material from oral historical genres. Like other Spaniards who wrote narratives structured by the genealogy of the Inca dynastic descent group, he collected this material from Inca sources. Like other Spaniards, he assumed that the material reflected a knowledge of the Inca past. He had firsthand acquaintance with the landscape of the Inca empire and could convince himself of the truth of the story he told. The story Cieza told explained the rise of Inca power-a power which was then still obvious. Like other Spaniards, Cieza did not refer to his sources except in a general way. Because of the filters of language and culture, even if he transcribed what he was told, the content was irrevocably altered. By making the stories he was told intelligible to another audience and by writing them down in a manuscript, both the meanings associated with the original genre or genres and the context of their transmission were lost.

Something may remain, but whether aspects of the underlying original can be recovered depends on how Cieza worked. Did he retell what he was told by informants who were transmitting material from Inca genres, injecting his own comments or interpretations at its margins? Or did he do "history" as we do it, taking material from whatever sources he had, reworking and reconceptualizing it to craft a narrative that fulfilled his own canons of historical writing, including notions of sequence and dynastic succession? To what extent did he bring the Inca past into line with the canons of universal history, a history that began with the book of Genesis? He was the first Spaniard to tread on new literary territory. As far as we know, he was the first to produce what was a new genre: the Spanish historical narrative of the Inca past.

In the years that followed, other Spaniards and two native Andeans were to craft some version of the same project. The Jesuit Bernabé Cobo, who wrote about the Incas in the mid-seventeenth century, said he could still collect the story of the dynastic past from the Incas of Cuzco, though he chose to work with manuscript sources in the creation of his own text ([1653], chap. 2; 1892:119). Although a memory of the Inca past underlay the movement of Topa Amaro in the eighteenth century to restore the Inca empire, the bishop of Cuzco, Manuel Moscoso y Peralta, wrote that local knowledge of the Inca past was taken largely from what Garcilaso de la Vega had written about it (Moscoso in Valcárcel 1983:276-277; Brading 1991:491). The genealogical tradition had survived, but it had survived through both visual representation-a series of portraits of the twelve rulers from Manco Capac to Huascar-and performance-processions of the same sequence of rulers (Pease García Yrigoyen 1992:321; Fane 1996:238-241; Gisbert 1994:149-157). These forms of remembrance were still powerful media for the representation of Andean autonomy and were recognized as such at the time of the Topa Amaro revolt in the 1780s (Rowe 1955:10, 26-27; Brading 1991:491).

Cieza's optimism about the durability of local knowledge of the Inca past-and, specifically, about the story he told of the deeds of the Inca rulers who expanded the authority of Cuzco across a large Andean territory-seems unwarranted in the late twentieth century. If the story he recorded drew from local knowledge in Cuzco, even if translated in word, format, and purpose, that knowledge does not appear to have survived among the descendants of the Incas. The stories that anthropologists have collected in the Cuzco region refer to Inkarrí, a word meaning "Inca rey," but do not reproduce the content of the Spanish historical narratives to any meaningful degree (see essays and transcriptions by Arguedas and Roel Pineda, Núñez del Prado, Valencia Espinoza, Flores Ochoa, and Pease García Yrigoyen in Ossio 1973). At the core of the Spanish historical narratives is a genealogical sequence, beginning with the origins of the dynastic line at the time of Manco Capac and his brothers and sisters-the Ayar siblings-and ending with the death of Huayna Capac, the eleventh ruler in the line of dynastic descent, when a civil war between his sons, Atahuallpa and Huascar, the twelfth Inca, began. The genealogical sequence that structures the Spanish historical narratives is not in evidence in the Inkarrí accounts.

Cieza and the other Spaniards who wrote about the Incas sometimes referred to the stories they were repeating as "fables," even as they narrated events in the lives of persons they took to have been living human beings. They were uncertain about the reliability of their material, and understandably so, since they could not have witnessed or had written testimony of the events they described. When the authors of these accounts referred to the Chanca attack on Cuzco-when the stones themselves turned into warriors-they could understand the battle as a historical event, even if clearly fabulous elements were part of the story. Just so they understood the assistance of St. James or the Virgin in the defeat of Manco Inca in the siege of Cuzco when these elements were incorporated into the narratives of events that were written after the fact. Where the "fabulous" elements remained fabulous in their narration of stories about the Incas, those that fit within Spanish canons of acceptable explanation could be believed.

Spaniards or Andean authors like Garcilaso Inca de la Vega who were educated had classical texts to provide them with models for the Inca empire. In their minds, the empire, par excellence, was Rome. It was a paradigm by which they could explain the Incas. The comparison between the Incas and Rome was evident in the physical remains of roads, bridges, and canals, but it went further. Inca imperial organization was perceived as "a positive cultural, religious and political force"; it had been a "good thing" (MacCormack 1998:8-10). Moreover, an acquaintance with classical texts gave these authors a touchstone by which they could interpret stories about the Inca past. They could read classical historians who dealt with fabulous origin stories and legends alongside accounts of historical events and, like them, recognize that "the deeds of gods and heroes had been interwoven with those of human beings, with the more reliable history of recent events" (MacCormack 1998:19). The incorporation of fabulous elements was not an obstacle to accepting the historicity of an account of the past.

A lot has changed. Some modern readers greet the fabulous elements and the plausibly historical content alike as myth. The denial of the historical content of works on the Inca past is expressed in two ways. One is the rejection of the descriptive categories used by Spaniards like Cieza in their narratives. When the Spaniards use terms like "king" to describe the Inca ruler or "empire" to describe the Inca project, they are forcing an Andean reality into alien categories (Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1999:ix-x, 1988:13-14; Pease García Yrigoyen 1995:72-78, 126 -127). The second form of denial asserts that Spanish authors misunderstood what they heard: the stories they were told by the Incas of Cuzco had no historical content; rather, they encoded the social organization of Cuzco or reflected other aspects of local knowledge (Zuidema 1964, 1995; Pease García Yrigoyen 1995:71-78; Urton 1990:6).

The first form of denial stems from a doubt about the capacity of Spaniards to interpret a fundamentally foreign world and is exacerbated by the difficulties of translating the meaning of foreign categories into another language. If we had source materials in the Inca language that revealed the nature of what the Spaniards termed "empire," we could partially mitigate this problem because we would gain an approximate understanding from these sources of what it was the Spaniards lacked the words to describe. Even if words get in the way, the Spanish historical narratives offer a perspective on Inca history that must be considered; the existence of an Inca state cannot be denied, and the last several rulers were documented both by the narratives and by witnesses who knew and served them (Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1999:22-36, 65-91, 178-179).

The second form of denial is a more serious challenge to interpreting the written sources that deal with the Inca past. It denies the existence of an Andean "history." History only arrived in the Andes with the Spaniards. Franklin Pease has used the shallowness of Spanish interest in the Inca past in the first years of their presence in the Andes as the core of his argument that the detailed later accounts of "Inca history" were driven by Spanish historiographical practice, that is, that the Spaniards gave the Incas a past by applying their own canons of universal history to what were essentially Inca myths (1995:72-78). Since the Spaniards were in close contact with the Incas from the beginning, their delay in using Inca sources as the foundation for an account of the Inca past provokes the conclusion that the histories they later wrote were their own invention.

The denial of the historical content of Inca sources was first put forward by Reiner Tom Zuidema in 1964. At that moment, Zuidema was not interested in explaining how the Spaniards reinterpreted what they heard from Inca sources. His denial simply cleared the way for the presentation of an alternative reading of the same texts: Zuidema would read them as myth, and as myth that encoded social organization or local knowledge (Nowack 1998a:133-143; Zuidema 1995, 1964; Urton 1990:6). The logic underlying this argument is that, since social organization is assumed to be immutable or nearly so, a temporal sequence that posits the entire evolution of a social order over only twelve generations must be wrong. If the end product reflects certain durable patterns of thought or explanation, then the end product cannot be something that came into existence through a stepwise evolution over a relatively short span of time. The denial of the historicity of an underlying Inca account is thus closely linked to the needs of the new interpretation: the Inca rulers did not succeed each other in real time but represent segments of the descent group that were always there.

If I may be so bold as to interpret the underlying logic of this argument again: it is based on a literalist reading of the dynastic "history" and does not take into account the possibility that the story was a representation of the past that was created at a specific moment. Even though a mechanism in each generation was the basis for defining panacas, or segments of the dynastic descent group, there was no gradual accrual of panacas. Rather, a new order was created by reinterpreting past practice according to a new set of rules. Two Spanish authors describe the creation of a historical record during the time of Pachacuti, the ninth Inca (Sarmiento de Gamboa [1572], chap. 9; 1906:3-31; chap. 30; 1906:68; Betanzos [1551-1557], chap. 17; 1987:85- 86). An account of the dynastic past crafted then would have explained the particular configuration of Cuzco that that Inca had imposed on the dynastic descent group and the other inhabitants of the Inca city after the Incas had launched an empire.

Rather than a faithful reflection of the past, it was a story which represented a new social order in historical terms. The "history" crafted at this time reflected the interests of a particular group, but it rewrote material that was known or believed about the past in line with new explanations of the rise to power of a segment within the larger group that was identified as Inca. The new history relied on a knowledge of actual dynastic descent and of the events associated with each generation of the dynastic descent group, but it incorporated a perspective that benefited a group that had emerged as uniquely powerful.

That the Incas preserved a knowledge of the line of dynastic descent through a form of genealogy-which is what the Spanish accounts explicitly tell us-cannot be denied so quickly. Clearly, the Spaniards worked from within the framework of their own sociology of knowledge. Just as clearly, whatever form of recorded memory that was found in the Andes answered different needs and purposes and had evolved in a different way from the historical practice of the sixteenth-century Spaniard. Still, there is a growing body of archaeological research, particularly on Inca architecture, that is establishing a concordance between material remains and the list of Inca rulers. The corpus of architecture associated with Pachacuti can now be distinguished on stylistic grounds from what was built during the rule of Huayna Capac, his grandson (Protzen 1993:257-269; Niles 1993:155-163, 1999:262-297). There are also indications that the Inca ceramic style will reflect the succession of Incas associated with the imperial expansion, both in Cuzco and the provinces (Julien 1993:181-199).

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS....................ix
1 INTRODUCTION....................3
2 CAPAC....................23
3 GENEALOGY....................49
4 LIFE HISTORY....................91
5 COMPOSITION....................166
6 EMERGENCE....................233
7 TRANSFORMATION....................254
8 ORIGINS....................269
9 CONCLUSIONS....................293
NOTES....................303
BIBLIOGRAPHY....................313
INDEX....................325

Editorial Reviews

Julien’s deep reading of Inca history addresses ongoing debates in the subfield of Andean ethnohistory. . . . Julien uncovers persuasive evidence that would indicate the Inca elite had generated both 'genealogy' (of the Manco Capac lineage) and ‘life history’(biographical profiles of the deeds of Inca dynasts).”— Choice

“Drawing from the research of John Rowe, Roland Hamilton, and Pierre Duviols . . . as well as her own extensive investigations, Julien presents a closely reasoned and detailed analysis of Inca sources in an attempt to establish which materials represented historical reality. ”—History: Reviews of New Books

“Julien’s work is rooted in careful scholarship and a profound understanding of the dynamics of Inca and Colonial political history. . . . She raises important issues that should engender lively debate among historians and ethnohistorians.”—Susan A. Niles, author of The Shape of Inca History

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