Segmentary State Formation and the Ritual Control of Water Under the Incas

Abstract

There is a strange and unacknowledged paradox in the historiography of the Incas. On the one hand, few would deny that theirs was a typically theocratic archaic state, a divine kingship in which the Inca was thought to.be the son of the Sun. On the other hand, the standard descriptions of Inca political structure barely mention religion and seem to assume a formal separation between state and cult. 1 I believe that these secularizing accounts are misguided and will show in this essay that the political structure of the pre-Columbian Andes took form primarily around a system of sacred ancestral relics and origin points known generically as huacas. Each huaca defined a level of political organization that might nest into units of a higher order or subdivide into smaller groupings. Collectively they formed a segmentary hierarchy that transcended the boundaries of local ethnic polities and provided the basis for empires like that of the Incas. However, these huacas were also the focus of local kinship relations and agrarian fertility rituals. The political structure that they articulated therefore had a built-in concern for the metaphysical reproduction of human, animal, and plant life. Political power in the pre-Columbian Andes was particularly bound up with attempts to control the flow of water across the frontier of life and death, resulting in no clear distinction between ritual and administration.

Landscape and Environment: Insights from the Prehispanic Central Andes

“…As sacred settings, they have been the focus of attention with respect to ritual practices, hypothesized indigenous orderings and prioritizings of landscape features, and productions and reproductions of the social order. Much of this has been based on ethnohistoric analogy to comparatively well-documented Inca sacred landscapes (Glowacki and Malpass 2003;Gose 1993;Reinhard 1985b). As Moore (2005, p. 218) emphasizes, such material must be used circumspectly (to cavalierly use the Inca as representative of lo andino-that is, Andean beliefs and practices generally-ignores intra-Andean variability in both space and time), but it is nevertheless invaluable.…”

Pourquoi fouiller des dépôts funéraires pillés ? Deux exemples et quelques réponses de Keushu (Ancash, Pérou)

“…At Keushu the absence of a roof is a shared trait, but only one of the two tombs under study makes use of natural rock for walls. Given the importance of mountains and rock outcrops in 16 th century Andean mythology [7,8] (on major oracles see Curatola and Ziólkowski [9]), this cannot be readily interpreted as a measure to reduce labour input. It seems more likely that people sought to keep the mortal remains of their ancestors in proximity to particular rocks or mountains imbued with symbolic meaning.…”

Adaptive strategies or ideological innovations? Interpreting sociopolitical developments in the Jequetepeque Valley of Peru during the Late Moche Period

“…These rites were more immanently and directly linked to agricultural production than were the sacrificial rituals performed by high lords in the cities and ceremonial centers of the Moche realm. Certainly, concerns with cosmological ordering and fertility (though likely more abstract at the level of elite performance) underscored generalized Moche religious practices on the North Coast (as it did for the Inka; Gose, 1993). Such emphasis on fecundity and rites of socio-cosmic reproduction Fig.…”

“…At the time of the conquest, spondylus was highly valued and extensively traded as a preeminent ritual object of agricultural ceremony. Spondylus offerings were revered for their magical power to draw fructifying water to planted fields (Gose, 1993;Pillsbury, 1996).…”