Hierarchy and Space in Incaic Social Organization

• Published in: Ethnohistory 1983-01, Vol.30 (2), p.49-75
• Main Author: Zuidema, R. T.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Brothers; Descendants; Incan culture; Incan history; Kings; Mummies; Nobility; Priests; Social organization; Sons
• ISSN: 0014-1801; 1527-5477
• DOI: 10.2307/481241

This paper was originally written for a symposium on "Social Stratification in the Andes" of the XLIst International Congress of Americanists, held in Mexico D.F. in 1974. A similar symposium at that Congress dealt with "Social Stratification in PreSpanish Mesoamerica" (Carrasco, Broda el al, 1976). A comparison of the Inca case to that of Mexico, especially that of Tenochtitlan, offers some striking differences. Whereas for Mexico there is a wealth of data on titles, ranks and offices and their associations to calendar, ritual and calpolli-organization - allowing, for the study of how a person could pass from one office and calpolli to another office and calpolli - the Andean data seem to be very meager on all these aspects. As it is hardly believable that an empire like that of the Incas did not have a well developed bureauracy together with its ritual expression, one reason for the failure to study this aspect of Andean culture might be a misunderstanding of the data. One aspect in which Andean culture differed strongly from the Mesoamerican one was its use of ancestral mummies and their cult. Spanish chroniclers and modern anthropologists understood the cult given by the Inca nobility more in terms of a spurious but believed Inca dynastic history, than in terms of a hierarchical system of mummies representing positions within a political and bureaucratic organization; this, notwithstanding the fact that our earliest chroniclers, who still could observe the mummy cult, did insist on the latter aspect. Mummies were less important for proving a genealogical relationship, than in "dressing them up" as part of a policy for establishing and reevaluating their political and hierarchical relationship. People could change their adherence from one mummy and its panaca or group of descendants to another, according to their interests and ambitions or possibilities. In short, Inca history is mostly a political myth and the hierarchical organization of the ancestral mummies gives us better data on Inca bureaucracy than on anything else.