Tag: The Inca

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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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Arguedas

IV: Sound and Light in Deep Rivers

José María Arguedas’ novel Deep Rivers follows a fourteen-year-old boy named Ernesto who, like the author, has Spanish and Indigenous Andean cultural roots. Through the course of the novel Ernesto confronts the complexity of Andean society and comes to assert his place in it. When he visits the Plaza de Armas in Cusco for the first time, he notices that “[t]he little trees that had been planted in the park and the arches seemed intentionally dwarfed in the presence of the cathedral and the Jesuit church” and says: “They must not have been able to grow … [t]hey couldn’t, in front of the cathedral” (Arguedas 9). Like the trees, Ernesto feels “completely subdued” in the shadow of the buildings, and it seems like they were designed this way (Arguedas 9). The buildings also dominate auditory space:

In the silence, the towers and the terrace echoed the smallest sound, like the rocky mountains that border the icy lakes. The rocks send back deep echoes of the cry of the ducks or of the human voice. The echo is diffused, and seems to spring from the very breast of the traveler, who is alert to the silence and oppressed by it. (Arguedas 9)

For Ernesto, the cathedral recalls the solidity of rocky mountains and icy lakes. To speak before its silence is to be in dialogue with only oneself—the returning echo “seems to spring from the very breast of the traveler” and oppresses them with the realization of their own isolation. The Spanish built these oppressive structures out of Inca stone chiseled into harsh rectangular bricks. Ernesto reflects that “Chiseling them must have broken their ‘enchantment.’ But perhaps the domes on the tower retain the radiance they say there is in heaven” (Arguedas 11). When I visited the cathedral, I thought the space was designed to direct attention to its statues and displays, the few sources of light, perhaps the domed ceilings. The stone supporting it all was secondary and not worthy of attention, its personality chiseled away. Ernesto describes how “[t]he light that filtered through the alabaster windows was different from sunlight,” and says that “it seemed as if we had fallen into some city hidden in the center of a mountain, under layers of inextinguishable ice that sent us light through the rocks” (Arguedas 19). All of this lightplay serves to direct attention towards the crucifix, “a forest of candles” burning before it, “a gilt altar screen in the background,” visible through the smoke (Arguedas 19). 

Blackened, suffering, the Christ maintained a silence that did not set one at ease. He made one suffer; in such a vast cathedral, in the midst of the candle flames and the daylight that filtered down dimly, the countenance of the Christ caused suffering, extending it to the walls, to the arches and columns, from which I expected to see tears flow. (Arguedas 20)

Ernesto finds that the ruins of the Amaru Cancha, visible from the street, allow a different kind of silence. He says: “it was the wall who commanded silence, and if someone were to sing out clearly, the stones would echo, with perfect pitch, the very same music” (Arguedas 12). Instead of intensifying one’s suffering and isolation, when the walls of the Inca palace speak back they make one feel heard. The silence is granted by a sense of awe, which creates a space for reflection. In another moment, Ernesto describes an Inca wall like this: “The lines of the wall frolicked in the sun; the stones had neither angles nor straight lines; each one was like a beast that moved in the sunlight, making me want to rejoice, to run shouting with joy, through some field” (Arguedas 18-19). While the Cathedral concentrates all of its light on the figure of Christ, each of the stones of the Inca wall play in the sunlight. I wonder how the ways the Inca and Spanish Catholic structures play with affect through sound and light speak to the values and practices of their societies, and want to investigate further.

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