Tag: The Ideal

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Garcilaso

IX. Barbarians

Finally he told them: ‘When you have reduced these people to our service, you shall maintain them in reason and justice, showing mercy, clemency, and mildness, and always treating them as a merciful father treats his beloved and tender children … I wish you as children of mine to follow this example sent down to earth to teach and benefit those men who live like beasts. And henceforward I establish and nominate you as kings and lords over all the people you may thus instruct with your reason, government, and good works.’ (Garcilaso 46-47)

Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, completed in 1612, is a history of Peru that describes the high rationality and civilization of the Incas to argue that the Spanish conquest was not wholly legitimate. Garcilaso was writing in response to Spanish authors who claimed that the barbarousness of the Indians justified their subjugation—that it was the correct duty of the Spanish to educate the Indians in the civilizing force of Christianity. Garcilaso does not refute Christianity; he argues that the Incas were not obstacles to it but paved the way for its introduction. The real obstacle to the full realization of Christianity was the greed of the Spaniards. Garcilaso was of the first generation of mestizos, of mixed Spanish and Incan blood, and proudly claimed the legitimacy of his argument from his roots in both societies.

The quote I included above is from Garcilaso’s account of the sun’s instructions for his first son and daughter on Earth. Garcilaso claims that the sun was the sole god of the Incas. Here the sun tells his children how they should treat non-Inca people. Notice the patriarchal attitude he assigns the Incas: to treat others “as a merciful father treats his beloved and tender children” and to be “kings and lords” over them. The sun is the father of the Incas who are to act as the fathers of the rest. While this patriarchal attitude seems to be benevolent, it creates and maintains a construction of non-Inca peoples as (effectively) children, whose ways of living and understanding are primitive in contrast with that of the Incas. Non-Inca people are granted a patronizing innocence. Incan and non-Incan groups are not antagonistic equals—the non-Incas have yet to be educated and civilized. Compared with the “reason, government, and good works” of the Incas, the non-Incas “live like beasts.”

I think Garcilaso draws his argument from the very discourses he wanted to combat, creating a barbarous non-Incan other to define his Incan ideal. Garcilaso does not do away with the idea of “barbarians” but instead recasts who embodies that category. The barbarians are no longer the “Indians” but the non-Incas; Garcilaso insists the Incas were a people as civilized as the ancient Romans (except for the fact that they lacked writing) who lived according to reason. While Garcilaso still held Christianity as his highest ideal for a people (it is important to remember: this was a necessity for him to receive a Christian audience), he managed to create an ideal conception of a non-Christian people, the Inca, palatable to a Christian audience. Like the distinction Guaman Poma creates between the Christian line of Topay Capac and the heathenous line of Manco Capac, Garcilaso’s casting of the Incas as rational and opposed to the non-Inca barbarians allows him to assert that not all “Indians” are the same. Barbarism then justified the Inca’s colonization of non-Inca peoples but not the Spaniard’s conquest of the Inca empire. I think it is significant that Garcilaso possibly adopted from the Spanish the argument that barbarism justifies colonization as well as the strategy of taking a patriarchal and infantilizing attitude toward the other to maintain them as barbarous. While these strategies may be abhorrent, Garcilaso’s Royal Commentaries are an early surviving example of the Spaniards’ justifications for colonization being used against themselves by an Indigenous writer.

I wonder if Garcilaso’s aim is common to all processes of colonization: propping up the image of the disparaged other to be more similar and worthy of value and respect from the standpoint of the colonizer. I also wonder to what extent casting other people as barbarous is necessary to assert the value of a culture. I’m thinking of how at the Inca ruins we have visited, like Sacsayhuamán, our tour guides have often claimed that the magnificence of the sites makes the fall of the Incas lamentable. What does this say about cultures that don’t have similarly surviving ruins? Do these claims disparage the value of these other cultures?

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Guaman Poma

VII: The Bible’s Influence on Pre-Columbian History

But the very first Inca, Tocay Capac, had no idol and no ceremonies; the Incas were free of such things until the reign of the mother and wife of Manco Capac Inca, followed by his lineage, who were descended from amaros (serpents). (Guaman Poma 32)

Felipe Guaman Poma de Alaya’s The First New Chronicle and Good Government is a massive manuscript finished around 1615 with nearly 400 drawings and 800 pages of text. It argues, primarily to the King of Spain, that many Spanish colonial forces like priests, corregidores and encomenderos are not good Christians, and should actually learn from the very “heathen” Indians they serve to subjugate. Guaman Poma writes Inca history and Christian history together, claiming that the first Indians were descendants of Noah who split off from the rest of humanity following the flood.

The quote I included above is Guaman Poma’s description of the beginning of the royal Inca lineage. He contests other chroniclers of Inca history to claim that the very first Inca, Topay Capac, was descended from Noah and that the Incas “had no idol and no ceremonies” until the reign of the mother and wife of Manco Capac Inca, who was descended from serpents. Effectively, Guaman Poma’s claim is that at the beginning of Inca history, Topay Capac’s rightful rule and lineage was usurped by a woman and that this event is to blame for all the ways the Incas have deviated from Christianity. If this event had not happened, the Incas would still be Christian, and Spanish colonization would have been completely unjustified. Inserting this usurpation at the beginning of Inca history allows Guaman Poma to externalize any Andean practice that diverges from Christianity as not truly Inca. It invites the King of Spain and other readers to not dismiss all Andean practices as heathenry but to interrogate them with critical eyes—to decide for themselves which Andean ways of life are good and evil. 

I find it curious how much Guaman Poma’s narrative of Incan history mirrors Christian narratives of history. The mother and wife (still getting over that concept) of the Manco Capac Inca, like Eve, are to blame for initiating the fall from grace and are negatively associated with serpents. A usurpation or transgression of the proper order of things is to blame for introducing everything undesirable—it explains why the real does not meet the ideal. Also, as the owner of a small gelato store in Cusco told me (I’m not sure how much of a reliable source he is, but he provides another account), the serpent does not carry the same negative connotation in Incan mythology as it does in Christian mythology. According to him, the serpent symbolized a connection to the underworld (not Hell) and was associated with agriculture and a certain kind of intelligence. Under the Inca, people were sorted into three archetypes or groups: condor, puma and serpent, and would work jobs related to their groups. Each of these was understood as complementary and necessary—people could also have multiple of these archetypes within themselves. So it’s very likely that Guaman Poma’s account of Incan history takes strong influence from the Bible, in a bid to preserve/create an ideal of the Incas (and the Indians) in the minds of the King and the Spanish. Guaman Poma effectively created a new ideal of the Incas to counter how the Spanish conceived of the Indians, to make Andeans more worthy of respect and critical attention.

I wonder if Guaman Poma was consciously playing with Incan history to effect practical change in the lives of Andeans (or if that matters?). If so, then was he willing to sacrifice the religious practices and traditions of his people for their survival? What Guaman Poma’s text makes clear is that there can be no representation of a culture or anything at all that is “pure” and uncontaminated by the very specific contexts and interests of its creator. 

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Rama

I: Layered Symmetries in Lima

Today we visited Museo Larco in Pueblo Libre, Lima, which had an amazing collection of pre-Incan art from the region of Peru. Each figure had such a striking personality. I mean, just look at this guy!

Our tour guide told us that the oldest buildings discovered in the region were religious temples. She said that, in the cultures of ancient Peru, the priests were all-powerful and served as governors. The cultures generally followed both dualities (understood as codependent, like night and day) and cyclical patterns, and this is reflected in their art. We analyzed a 2500-year-old rug (fatefully preserved in the Peruvian desert) to see how it incorporated both of these patterns. It made me think that ancient Peruvian cities (especially since the first buildings were built with religious intent) would be similarly designed to embody these patterns or logics.

In “Pre-Hispanic Lima,” Vélez writes that, beginning with edicts during the reign of Charles V and Philip II in the 16th century, the Spanish Crown followed the policy of not founding cities amidst pre-existing Indigenous settlements. While this is supposedly the case with Lima, “it so happens that [the region has] an elusive, centuries- or millennia-long heritage, as some of the most ancient (over twelve thousand years old) human settlements known have been discovered in its vicinity” (Vélez 9). Vélez adds that “[s]ome believe … that the promontory of the atrium of the Cathedral of Lima may betray the presence of a small native huaca, or shrine, which was, as was common practice at the time, destroyed prior to the construction of the Christian temple” (Vélez 11). This practice of building settlements upon cultural or religious sites important to previous groups can also be seen in the case of the Basilica Santa María del Mar in Barcelona, likely built upon a Roman amphitheatre, which may have itself been built upon culturally significant neolithic settlements.

In The Lettered City, Rama writes about how the cities that the Spanish founded in the Americas, like Lima, reflected their utopian visions of the future, grounded in their notion of “reason” as the only divine, unerring source of knowledge. These new cities were designed to be “rational” and embody their regulating principles of “unity, planning, and rigorous order reflecting a social hierarchy” (Rama 5). As an anonymous commenter on the 1746 earthquake in Lima writes, “Lima had arriv’d to as great a degree of perfection as a city situated such distance from Europe … the streets were laid-out with the exactest regularity, and adorned with all the beauty which a nice symmetry could give” (Anonymous 47).

These reflections have got me interested in how the patterns or symmetries of the pre-Columbian cultures of Peru might persist in today’s Lima. This could be as small as how the curvature of the plaza around the Basilica Santa María del Mar reflects that of the former Roman amphitheater. I am more broadly interested in how spatial patterns and logics reflect a culture’s religions, philosophies and mythologies, and what it looks like (spatially) when these conflict.

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