Indecent Living: Indigenous Women and the Politics of Representation in Early Colonial Peru
The main period of consolidation and reform of the early Peruvian colony—the 1560s through the 1580s—also marked the beginning of the invention of the economic and social character of the colony in the Spanish empire. This new role was constructed and normalized in part via a reimagination of the pre-Hispanic past, of which the colony could be seen as both an outgrowth and a corrective. Within the context of the contemporary political and economic crises in which colonial Viceroys and other functionaries found themselves during these decades—crises of  nancial realization, demographic collapse, civil rebellions and indigenous uprisings—the authors of of cial political narratives envisioned an ef cient state that would have legitimacy among both colonizers and colonized. The narratives and reports that grew out of this legitimating project developed a narrow, Cuscocentric vision as they emphasized pre-Hispanic institutions that indicated the preferred direction of the colonial state, including the Inca legal system and rules for political succession. One of the most interesting institutions thus held up for admiration and consideration was the acllahuasi , a Quechua word used by these Spaniards to refer to what was probably an array of social institutions involving groups of con ned women called acllas or mamaconas. The changing and narrowing representations of the acllas—as a harem, as productive and tradeable commodities, as “vestal virgins” or beatas, and  nally as idealized wives of the state—indicated the shifting agendas of the authors and patrons of these narratives towards a discourse that celebrated centralization, hierarchy and separation between classes and ethnic groups. While the historical narratives that emerged during and from this political debate were not necessarily instrumentalist , I argue here that the construction of this discursive terrain was a by-product that had its own effects upon, at least, our knowledge of colonial Peru. My argument is organized around some key texts written during this central period of constitution of the political economy of colonial Peru, and demonstrates how the development of a more centralized vision of the colony by its administrators and elites contributed to the construction and acceptance of a historical narrative, the terms of which were commonly deployed by those in power as well as their critics. I begin with the chronicles of conquest, written within a few years of contact by the conquistadores themselves. These reveal the spontaneous and indetermi-
Politics, infrastructure and non-human subjects: The Inka occupation of the Amaybamba cloud forests
This dissertation presents the results of an
archaeological study of the Inka occupation and transformation of
the Amaybamba Valley, Peru, during the Late Horizon, just prior to
the Spanish Conquest. This region lies among the dense cloud
forests of the eastern Andes, and was situated at the northwestern
edges of the Inka heartland centered around the former imperial
capital of Cuzco. The main interest for the Inkas in the Amaybamba
lay in its capacity to produce large amounts of coca, a plant which
was the foundation of a great many exchange relationships across
the Andes. Not only was it central to exchanges between humans, but
also with the most important non-human powers of the Inka world.
These powers included major landscape entities, such as the
mountains (apukuna) and other kinds of earth beings (often in the
form of rock outcrops, or lakes, known as wak'as). The main focus
of this dissertation is the question of how these entities were
made subjects of the Inka polity. The broader theoretical framework
that underpins my thesis is what I refer to as `political
ontology', from which I argue for taking a `step-back' from more
traditional (post-Enlightenment) accounts of politics which assume
the state is a set of relationships between human actors only, and
thereby consider the possibility of non-modern states in which
other-than-human beings could be made into political subjects. The
Amaybamba is thus presented as a case-study through which we can
examine the empirical, archaeological traces of just such processes
of subjectification. The Inka presence in the Amaybamba mainly took
the form of a series of royal landholdings, which were associated
with a number of aristocratic lineages within the empire. My
arguments therefore have broader implications for how we understand
the royal estate system more generally. In particular, I suggest
that the royal estates - which appear from our Western perspective
to resemble a series of elite-owned plantations - were in Inka eyes
seen more as a means to discipline and control the productive
capacities of a potent community of non-humans.
CATARACT: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE.
The earliest extant description of a surgical operation for the cure of cataract is that of Celsus, toho practiced medicine in Rome at the beginning of the Christian era. In his text De Meclicina he described in detail his method of couching, by which he inserted a bronze needle into the eye at the equator on the lateral side of ihe globe and depressed the cataract downward into the lower part of the vitreous where the surgeon hoped it would remain out of the way of vision. The same method had been employed by the Greeks and Hindus for at least several hundred years earlier and ivas to continue as the only operation available until the middle of the eighteenth century when Daviel of Paris described extraction of the lens through the cornea. The early couchers worked on the premise that the crystallin humor we know as the lens was the receptor for vision, and that in certain conditions of disease a suffusion flowed doivn in front of the crystallin humor where it solidified and formed a dense curtain. The purpose of couching was to press the hardened corrupt humor out of the way of the lens. That cataract was opaque material within the lens itself was not recognized until after the middle of ihe seventeenth century. Until then ihe surgeons were not even aware that it was the lens they were dislocating.