Andean anthropology has an enduring fascination with Inka "ethnohistory and the desire to identify the distinctively ‘Andean’ in a region that has been in constant and intensive contact with the West for over 500 years. Indeed one of the fascinating features of the social and cultural practices of this region is the way in which a sense of ‘cultures in contact’ has been sustained and reproduced over the centuries in both academic writing and local discourse.
The Inkas operated as the central icon of cultural difference in nineteenth-century Americanist debates on evolution, savagery and civilization, and were the central focus of foun-dational works of this century on kinship and political economy. The richness of the archival and archaeological records has promoted a fruitful collaboration between historians (many of them Latin Americans) and anthropologists of the region. More problematically, the politics of nationalism has drawn support from academic interest in contemporary manifestations of the pre-Hispanic and what is often an anachronistic search for authenticity that reproduces many of the racist paradigms of nineteenth-century scholarship. Nevertheless, historical understanding is basic to the anthropology of this region.
In the mid-fifteenth century, the Inkas were a small ethnic group of the central-southern Andes. Within 100 years they had come to exercise political and economic control over a territory that stretched from present-day Colombia to central Chile through the use of a large standing army, severe resettlement and colonizing policies and the imposition of labour tribute. Local ethnic groups were obliged to participate in a highly centralized system of hierarchical reciprocity and redistribution, which drew on local idioms of kinship and affinity for its legitimation. State-sponsored ceremonial spectacle, involving both rulers and subjects in the public enactment of the Inkas’ sacred genealogy forced subjugated ethnic groups to collaborate in the gendered representation of the ‘conquest hierarchy’ of empire (Silverblatt 1987).
The Spanish, aided by the epidemics which ravaged the Central and South American populations, ousted the Inka rulers in the 1530s and began to wage their own campaign of cultural and economic domination. The Inka Empire was subsumed by the Viceroyalty of Peru, which in the sixteenth century comprised all the Spanish territories in South America. Unlike the Inkas, who had employed familiar notions of kinship and political organization, the Spaniards used European models of rank and prestige through which to distinguish themselves and to differentiate the indigenous population into local elites and a newly homogenized indigenous mass. In ideological terms their evangelizing mission forced a categorical distinction between the Christian and the pre-Christian and introduced absolute values of good and evil.
The administrative changes brought about by the emergence of the independent republics in the nineteenth century were constructed not just against Spain but also against local indigenous populations. The transfer of power was from one group of White rulers to another. The end of the colonial regime signified changes in national economic policy. Nevertheless until recently the majority of Andean peoples have been peasant farmers living from the production of potatoes and maize, and the herding of llamas, alpacas and sheep.
Since the middle of this century national governments have orchestrated social change in distinctive ways, but in all Andean nations people have lived through an era of modernization marked particularly by the development of transport infrastructure, the introduction of centralized education programmes and universal franchise, and an increase in migrant labour and urbanization. Evangelical Protestantism has had a major influence on the religiosity of Andean peoples and the violence associated with warfare and the drugs trade has also dramatically affected many people’s lives.
‘Scientific’ anthropology
In the nineteenth century, Americanists were concerned to trace the similarities and evolutionary connections between the peoples of North, South and Middle America. As a region the Andes became quite central to these debates, particularly in US scholarship. The Inkas, taken as an example of civilized indigenous culture, were used as a point of comparison to denigrate both contemporary Andean peoples and, of more significance for US internal politics, the North American indigenous cultures. The supposed gap between past glory and presentday poverty in the Andean region was explained by a theory of degeneration which presumed that the Inkas were a doomed race, with parallel weaknesses to the great oriental civilizations that so preoccupied European writers of the time. Ostentatious displays of wealth, non-Christian religions, polygamy, etc. were understood as manifestations of decadence and internal weakness (Poole 1995). By the early twentieth century recognizably modern anthropology was emerging. Ethnographers knowledgeable in Andean languages (Germans, French and North Americans and many gifted local students), began to counter the racist depictions of Andean peoples.
The principles and politics of integration
John Murra and Tom Zuidema are the key influences on contemporary Andean anthropology. Both were interested in the principles through which the Inka state cohered as a socio-cultural entity. Murra’s analysis of Inka political economy was developed within a broadly Marxist framework. Employing the notion of ‘verticality’, he discussed the ways in which the Inkas modified pre-existing systems of exchange across ecological zones. Under an ideology of reciprocity and redistribution the Inkas controlled both the production and exchange of goods by ensuring that altitude-specific products (particularly potatoes, maize and coca), all technically pertaining to the Inka, passed through the Inka administrative centres and were not exchanged in local markets (Murra 1956).
Zuidema was also interested in political control but he used a structuralist approach to investigate the underlying symbolic logic of cultural forms and practices such as kinship classification, the spatial organization of irrigation systems, and the agricultural and religious calendars. Principles of complementary dualism were identified as key features of Inka thought, integrated in a complex system that drew together temporal concerns with spatial organization (Zuidema 1964).
The work of Murra and Zuidema set the agenda for subsequent generations of anthropologists who both continued the work on the Cuzco region of southern Peru and began to contrast these findings with the ethnohistorical records of other Andean regions. An important outcome of the work in contemporary ethnohis-tory has been the increased awareness of the variable efficacy of Inka control and cultural influence and the reassertion of the cultural differences within the Andean region which had been so comprehensively obscured by both Inka and Hispanic regimes (Salomon 1985).
The ethnohistorical record also serves as a useful source of comparative material through which to discuss various contemporary cultural practices, particularly the widespread importance of principles of asymmetrical dualism and hierarchical complementarity. These principles of dual organization, recurrent in local understandings of fertility and reproduction, are depicted as a balanced relationship between complementary forces necessary to organic reproduction, a balance that has constantly to be achieved from oppositions that tend to asymmetry (Murra et al. 1986).
Defining the Andean
Andean peoples do not think of themselves as culturally equivalent. Nevertheless, the task of defining ‘the Andean’ set by local intellectuals involved in the politics of modernization, and underwritten by the majority of those working in the region, led to a proliferation of descriptive ethnography on local belief and practice. In the 1950s and 1960s these village studies were concerned to guide planned social change, but by the 1970s Andean ethnology was involved in a wide variety of fields, which can be roughly subdivided into four major areas.
First, the anthropological concern with the relationship between community and economy has generated studies in kinship and productive activity (Bolton and Meyer 1977; Larson and Harris 1995). Relations of reciprocity between bilaterally reckoned kin groups, across ecological zones, between moieties, among consanguineal, affinal and spiritual kin, and between the human and spirit worlds, are all key features of Andean productive practice. Central to these debates are the varying concepts of community operating in Andean social life, communities that came into existence during the colonial period and whose fiscal status and relationship to the land have varied enormously over time and space. The Andean ayllu is a genealogical and political unit of social action which can be grounded in kinship, territory, and/or labour organization, and operates at the level of the state, the ethnic group, the kindred, or through relationships of compadrazgo. As a principle of differentiation the ayllu is relational and operationalized con-textually. The ideological force of the concept relates back to the Inka system in which the ayllu, as a genealogical unit, was a descent group centred on the sibling pair and generative of two lineages through principles of parallel descent, while the ayllu as political unit implied hierarchical subordination and was conceptualized in such a way that the more inclusive group was conceptualized as male.
Second, studies of Andean religiosity have discussed the voracious and unpredictable nature of the spirits that animate the local landscape and the centrality of sacrifice for the regeneration of fertility. The human and the spirit world are frequently found to exist in a relationship of mutual consumption. In return for rain, humans offer their vital substance to the spirits. Scholars of Andean Christianity have theorized the relationship between great and little traditions, particularly in relation to pilgrimage, and described the beliefs and practices of Catholics inextricably involved with the capricious and dangerous autochthonic spirits of the landscape (Sallnow 1987).
Third, the study of the Quechua and Aymara languages was developed in relation to various national policies for the integration of indigenous communities, educational reforms and the spread of literacy. Considerable attention has been paid to the history of standardization and codification and to contemporary socio-linguistics, particularly the study of bilingualism.
Finally there is the topic of ethnicity and identity which embraces all the above concerns. There has been a continuing fascination with the categorization of the Andean population and constant attempts to define the cultural content of the racial categories of the colonial period. These categories, which both differentiated racial types and homogenized the cultural diversity of Andean peoples, have been sustained in those Andeanist writings which continue to evoke and distinguish Indians from other racial groups (particularly mestizos, Whites, and Blacks). The tendency has been particularly strong in the acculturation literature, which presupposes the gradual elimination of local difference by global concerns.
History and social change in the late twentieth century
As suggested above, the salient context for the emergence of these topics of anthropological interest has been the modernizing nation state and the concerns of local intellectuals to influence government policy towards the indigenous populations. This context has affected approaches to Andean ethnicity. Attention is now increasingly paid to the active participation of Andean peoples in identity politics. Instead of treating such practice as the clash of two systems, or the absorption of the local by the global, scholars are looking at the ways in which local practice incorporates the outside as part of itself despite discourses of antagonistic and contending fields. Indeed the constant production and reproduction of an inside/ outside distinction can be taken as a central aspect of such practices and attention is now paid to the cultural work required to sustain the living memory of the conquest and the presence of an alien culture 500 years after the arrival of the Europeans. In this respect local understandings of history have been the focus of much attention. Andean accounts of historical process stress the importance of catastrophic events which turn the world upside down and there is much interest in millenarianism. The ways in which contemporary peoples formulate and reformulate their history involve the creation of moral links (or breaks) with the past through which local people articulate their own distinctive sense of self (Allen 1988). Furthermore, historical consciousness is not necessarily a verbal affair but is embedded in public ceremonial and in daily practices such as textile and agricultural production (Howard-Malverde 1996). In some areas history is literally dug into the land as agricultural and ritual activities combine to locate temporal structures in the landscape (Rappaport 1990).
Research into the specificity of Andean modernity has become central to the analysis of contemporary issues such as the war between the state and the Maoist Shining Path movement in Peru, the nationalist Katarista movement in Bolivia, the increasing presence of Evangelical Protestant churches, and the processes of migration and urbanization which have brought the majority of Andean peoples to the metropolitan centres (Skar 1994). And while it is the case that modernity and the capitalist economy have been and continue to be played out through contemporary understandings of race, it is imperative to recall that modernity is not a unified coherent project in either practice or ideology, and an understanding of the different procedures of nationalization both within and across the various republics is fundamental to an appreciation of the subjectivities, desires and memories that characterize the contemporary Andean world (Poole 1995).
