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.