Reading the Inka Empire

 

Malpass, Michael A., Daily Life in the Inca Empire (2nd edn, Westport, Connecticut, 2009).

I’ve studied and taught much about the Inka Empire, and have sometimes briefly consulted Malpass’s first edition, but nothing can prepare the reader for this second edition, which brings together and thoroughly treats the findings of the last decades, rich with surprise. The reader finds himself newly evaluating everything previously known. Malpass is such a well-organized and gifted writer that there seems to be room for presentation of all the various novel views, featured as if miniature debates. The ordering of the chapters, the coherence of the entire volume, how it captures what it captures, is a perfect model for how a book ought to be written. The comprehensive recapitulation of the many ancient Andean cultures, forerunners to the Inca, is a marvel of both detail and clarity. It can’t be topped anywhere. 

Of tremendous interest are discussions about textiles and social classes, a discussion rich in semiotics and cultural history, and a chapter on the true purpose and significance of Machu Picchu, and its architectural marvels. The book turns Peru into worlds yet unknown. The bibliography is worth its weight in gold. 

Nothing of value escapes Malpass. He ends with a plea to protect the rich ruins scattered throughout the Americas and details the threats. Already in January 2021 I’ve read an article in The Guardian about how a group has recently rented a backhoe and destructively plowed through a site in the archaic Supe Valley, which houses the oldest settlements and cities of all the Americas. The same party has also threatened to kill the famous archaeologist working there. Why? An extended family claims the land.

D’Altroy, Terence N., The Incas (2nd edn, West Sussex, 2015).

Malpass considers D’Altroy’s book, addressing his first edition, to be the latest word on the Inca (or Inka) Empire, but here we find the 2015 edition, new, ambitious, encyclopaedic, with beautiful chapters on Inca artisanry, institutions, religion, history and the sources of history. A surprise, a correction to what I've repeated for years, is learning that Quechua was not the language of the Inca rulers, a language—their language--then imposed on the conquered populations as an instrument of oppression. Nothing of the sort. The linguistic realities are far more complex and fascinating than one had supposed. Neither is the history of the Incas as clear cut as earlier authors suggested—I had discovered Catherine Julien’s revolutionary 2009 Reading Inca History just last year (2019), 19 years behind schedule. Everything we once thought we knew, even the short list of Inca rulers, has been turned on its head.

D’Altroy is proud of a new chapter on Andean philosophy in the 2nd edition. “Thinking Inka” is intended to soften the etic tone of the book and duly provides the reader a jot of linguistic analysis, thoughts about space-time, and a rather stilted overview of Science v. Religion. “Thinking Inka,” though ambitious, lacks nuance and remains incomplete and intellectually unsatisfying. That said, I wish to read it again, ponder on how the Inka organized their universe.

The updated bibliography, on the other hand, is marvelous, though it omits one remarkable historian who dedicated two large and beautifully written books on the Inca Empire—books marvelous in their creativity, emic approach, and evaluation of the early source material. The reputation of the historian is considered mere dross today, unworthy of mention, though the reader who often enough grits the teeth at D’Altroy’s dense, repetitive, and utilitarian prose style (though he shows himself capable of some fine style when discussing Incan artisanry), and hardly endures D’Altroy’s repeated apologies for that style, knows that the unnamed and unnoted historian might have taught today’s most acclaimed anthropologists both a little something about beautiful writing as well as the emic approach to the Inca that D’Altroy so ambitiously tries to convey. [Burr Cartright Brundage ought yet to be read.]

The strongest chapters treat Peru’s natural setting and the astonishing environmental zones exploited by the Andeans, the social engineering that moved populations hither and yon to work the imperial bidding, the crafting of stone to blend with natural outcrops, the shaping of canals and fountains, and cutting the limitless and imaginative road system. The book thus captures, with comprehensive force and beauty the Andean mastery of the environment. One doesn't see in the Inca Empire the widespread ecological destruction found at Cahokia and Chaco Canyon.

The Hojoki

 

The following review of Kenko, Yoshida and Kamo no Chomei, Essays in Idleness and Hojoki, tr. with forward, Meredith McKinney (London, 2014).was penned in 2020:

The classic of Chomei, Hojoki, or Record of a Ten-foot-Square-Hut, is often noted for the simple beauty of Chomei’s escape from the world and simple, peaceful life in a ten-foot-square hut, but it is in the immediacy of his vivid descriptions that pour from his pen of fire, tornado, earthquake, political disruption, famine, and plague that visit the capital, in terrifying clusters, during his lifetime that concerns students today. Reading tragic literature yet works its catharsis. The unfamiliar place names provide us with a safe distance as we experience through Chomei’s eyes, how the residents of a faraway Kyoto once confronted battalions of natural disasters. 

Safe distance? Not for this Californian. What comes to mind is a sequence of paintings, LA Burning, which I discovered one calm day in the Laguna Beach Art Museum, the most shocking art I had ever seen outside Goya. Much later, though not long after a destructive fire rubbed out every other mansion, sad row of teeth, perched in magnificence above Laguna, including, so far as I could discern, one in which I had once set foot and admired (with some inner reproof at the ostentation), a towering Christmas tree, I again saw the museum. LA Burning was nowhere in view, and my inquiry was met with a startled look. Shawn Gargiulo is the artist.

After a devastating famine, the fire within, Kyoto met a fresh disaster: “So the first year drew somehow to a close. We hoped for recovery in the new year, but instead a plague was added to our woes, and every semblance of the old life was now gone. All despaired, and we were like fish in a fast-drying pond, as calamity tighten its grip on the world from day to day (9).” “Again, in the fourth month of the fourth year of Jisho a great whirlwind sprang up in the Nakamikado Kyoguku area, and swept down through the city to around Rokujo. Over three or four blocks, every single house, large or small, in the path of the swirling wind was destroyed. Some were utterly flattened, while only the pillars and beams of others remained (6).”

“The wind was fierce and the night tumultuous, and at the Hour of the Dog a fire broke out in the capital’s south-east, and spread to the north-west. Eventually the Shujaku Gate, the Hall of State, the University Hall and the Civil Affairs Bureau all caught fire, and in a single night were reduced to ashes (6).”

The distance found by modern readers in the unfamiliar names helps work the catharsis. When will we sort through the desecration of our own Hall of State? The resolution to live a simple life, unattached, days taken up with reading, music, gardening, show how one individual, long ago, coped, in lock down, with natural disasters.

We now turn to Kenko’s Tales of Idleness: “And so, watching the new year dawn in the sky, you are stirred by a sense of utter newness, although the sky looks no different from yesterday’s" (Chapter 19). Chapter 20 follows: “A certain recluse monk once remarked, ‘I have relinquished all that ties me to the world, but the one thing that still haunts me is the beauty of the sky.’ I can quite see why he would feel this.”  We recall Calvin at Geneva, the man who daily, weekly, forever, refused to let his eyes gaze on the world’s most stunning lake. 

Then Chapter 21: “You can find solace for all things by looking at the moon. Someone once declared that there is nothing more delightful than the moon, while another disagreed, claiming that dew is the most moving—a charming debate.” These Essays in Idleness, another classic from Medieval Japan, are aesthetic Ramblings, random jottings on the beautiful and the lost, on the unusual or unexpected.

“Foxes will bite people.

A retainer at the Horikawa mansion was once bitten on the foot by a fox while he slept. And one night, three foxes leaped out and bit a junior monk who was passing the main hall of Ninnaji Temple. He drew his sword and defended himself, managing to cut down two of them" (Chapter 218).

Kenko surprises in passing from one random note to another, in the Japanese fashion: foxes, streams, the moon, trees, women of elegant taste not long passed from the world, empty space. How can we reach such a faraway aesthetic?

I remember Autumn 2019. The sun had set, the classroom grew dark, and, lights out, the Asian history class loved listening to the tale of Japan and autumn, the impermanence, the falling leaves, the moon. The responsiveness of all the students surprised me. But this is Utah, and Utah and autumn, I have learned, is the high point of the year. Fall in California always caught the attention, leaves everywhere, but it was also our winter, a season of mixed responses and dark evenings. We can all share Chapter 212, with a touch of nostalgia: “The moon of autumn is especially splendid. It is a sorry man indeed who cannot understand this distinction, and claims that it is no different from the moon at other seasons" (Chapter 212).

"The Great Qualifications and Powers of the Daughters of God"

In his first interview with the press, Dallin H. Oaks, newly ordained President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, shared that "We have not always been wise in using the great qualifications and powers of the daughters of God." "We have work left to do" (https://www.thechurchnews.com/leaders/2025/10/16/president-dallin-h-oaks-first-interview-as-church-president/).

I attended a Saturday student symposium today at Brigham Young University. Things got going at 9:30 a.m. the Joseph F. Smith Building, kept going for five hours, and every one of the students I listened to in the various sessions impressed me deeply.

A little while before the event started, I was walking in the Student Center.

A knot of students were laying out some extensive contraptions in a large space for yet another big BYU production. Meanwhile, the best laid plans were moving toward the oft awry.

A young man, standing at some distance, suddenly shouted at me in a very determined voice: 

“Hey!”

He then pointed at a young woman—one of those shining BYU students—and yelled:

“Never listen to HER!”

 

“Well, I never have,” I replied. 

 I then added, “But I am planning to be listening to her in the future.”

One can only imagine the context; the young woman's only response to her introduction-at-large was a bewildered: "What!?"

Within a couple of hours I found myself--a guest on campus--moderating a student panel for music and art, the speakers being four poised young women, all clear of voice, articulate, and enriched by languages, international experience, and science galore. They created paintings, sculptures, whatever it took, to illustrate their themes. None of them struck me as arrogant, only as qualified and powerful--and we'll be hearing much more from each of them.

It’s clear that the future of this Kingdom will have everything to do with whether we (all of us) always listen to the women of the Church. God gave some apostles, some prophets, some pastors, it is true, and in that truth we remain doctrinally secure—but above and beyond all else, gift of gifts, He gave His Kingdom not only the Three Zinas but numberless exemplary women. We should all plan on listening.