Daily Life in the Inca Empire.

A recent addition to the "Daily Life Through History" series, this book is a compendium on the Incas. As authors of a large Andean empire, the Incas were a conquering elite. To give this book something of a view from below, Malpass fuses archaeological, ethnohistorical and ethnographic sources at his disposal to trace the lifeways of two social categories: the Inca elite and the "conquered people." The audience for the book is the general reading public. The format chosen is ethnographic, and in this enterprise Malpass draws heavily on his predecessors, John Rowe and Ann Kendall.(1) Those who have written in this vein have been archaeologists. Malpass, too, is an archaeologist by training and practice, and shows his colors by incorporating a summary of the remote Andean past and a section on the destruction of archaeological sites that is a primer on the historical cost of removing beautiful things from their primary contexts.

In the case of the Andes, where writing was first introduced with the arrival of Spaniards, only archaeology offers a direct window on the past. However, the individual disappears from the archaeological record except for burial contexts and ambiguous iconographic appearances. Events, even transcendentally important ones, slip through the cracks. Aspects of everyday economic life, on the other hand, are everywhere. Archaeology has the potential to give the view from below like nothing else can, but the recent trend has been to study early periods. At the same time, there has been a boom in ethnohistorical publication on the Incas. Malpass harvests a great deal from recent work, and hence, his book is a window on this scholarship. Nonetheless, doing ethnohistory is problematic since the sources all postdate the events and are passed through the filters of language and culture. Certain aspects of the historical enterprise are missing in this work. There is no great time depth to the Inca empire (it was launched about 100 years before the Spanish arrival), and ethnohistorians, like archaeologists, deal with the Incas in a single phase. Few scholars of the Incas offer any analysis beyond the rankest speculation of how things developed or changed as the Incas fused diverse peoples into the largest imperial structure in the Americas. Malpass uses a series of dates offered in one Spanish historical narrative, but these are misleading, even if they are reasonable estimates for the length of rule of several later kings. Without the overarching narrative, starred with dates and events and peopled by those who wielded power, there is no framework or context in which to lodge archaeological studies at the household level. Even when ethnohistory can develop images of ordinary practice, say labor organization, for example, it often cannot tell whether or how it was used by the local or imperial elite and in whose benefit. Models, interpretation and off-the-wall assumptions underlie general works on the Incas to a much greater degree than is the case of scholarship on the Spanish colonial period immediately following.

Interpretive perils abound in this kind of enterprise. To cite an example, an assumption that is unwarranted in the Inca case (and evident in Malpass' book) is that there were full-time specialists. Evolutionary thought substitutes for history to such a degree in anthropology that even a large body of evidence cannot shake the idea that full-time specialization is necessary for the evolution of the state. The Incas organized the production of ceramics, textiles, wooden objects, featherwork, sandals and other goods, settling the producers in communities both near and far from their territory of origin. However, all were given fields for subsistence production, even where the settlements were near the altitudinal limits of agriculture and had to be supplemented with food production from lowland colonies. In the case of Cuzco, the capital, food was produced on land near town and on nearby private estates, but even the kings themselves participated in planting. There is no evidence for full-time specialization, and the Incas seem to have deliberately avoided the creation of urban populations dependent on daily markets for their subsistence.

One expectably perilous domain is the interpretation of gender differences. The assumption that men were subject to tribute requirements while women were exempt, here offered, is untenable. The underlying unit of assessment was the household, populated by an adult male and an adult female, be they spouses or a mother and an adult son. There is no reason to think that the tribute burden fell more heavily on men than on women or that the Incas altered the organization of labor at the household level. The household was the essential productive unit, and households were assessed from each administrative unit for relocation to productive communities. A community of weavers, for example, would be created, comprised of households taken from the different administrative subunits of a much larger group. Relocation facilitated the supplying of raw materials and the transport of the finished product, but did not alter ethnic affiliation with the larger group. There was no centralized workplace in these productive communities, and production continued to be centered on the household. Local gender differences in the organization of labor could easily have continued even in such artificial communities. In his treatment of gender, Malpass follows the recent work of Irene Silverblatt, who argues that the Incas introduced inequality in the Andes, subordinating women by assigning them tasks such as weaving while elevating male prestige by giving them opportunities to serve in military campaigns.

Most authors too readily assume that warfare and heavy work were the domain of men. Early written sources tell us very little about gender differences, but the few fleeting mentions permit us to question such assumptions. For example, Inca armies travelled great distances to reach the military campaigns endemic to the northern frontier. Burden-bearing was women's work (and still is). Cieza de Leon, travelling with an army in the Andes in 1548-49, expressed his surprise when the men of the northern highlands sent their women to serve as burden-bearers for the Spanish soldiers. The men, he says, remained behind, and were excessively concerned with their appearance.(2) When the Incas recruited people from the provinces to participate in campaigns at the frontier, entire households went. If women were on the scene, they may not have been idle during battle. In Inca myth and in accounts of the defense of Cuzco, the near-demonic acts of several Inca women in hand-to-hand combat are singled out for mention. As for agriculture, the one gender-specific task was plowing: the footplow was used exclusively by men. However, both sexes were involved. Men broke the sod with the footplow and women turned the large clods over. Guaman Poma de Ayala, a native author who drew scenes of Andean people engaged in many ordinary activities, shows a line of men with footplows accompanied by a line of women turning over the broken sod. He describes them as singing, and we can imagine their songs to be like some of the traditional music of Cuzco where men sing a line and women answer back.(3) Differences are there, but symmetry and complementarity are more important cultural motifs than inequality.

Gender inequality may be on our minds now, but some of us would rather ask what was on their minds then. Some of the historical narratives on the Incas describe the gathering of provincial women by Inca officials, to be redistributed for various purposes. Malpass treats this aspect of Inca practice, but only just mentions state involvement in electing the marriage partners of subject peoples. Few students of the Incas have taken vague references about state control over marriage seriously, but specific descriptions of it have been appearing in recently published documentation for the provinces, taken from the mouths of "conquered peoples" who describe the arrival of Inca administrators whose task it was to decide who would marry whom. Control over reproductive activity, namely who would reproduce and what kind of product would result, was important to the Incas. Inca men tried to produce as many offspring as possible. Male children may have been problematic, but the production of many daughters was a desirable cultural goal. Inca women were often given in marriage to provincial elites. They were political capital. The removal of daughters from elite families in the provinces - the "chosen" women noted by Malpass - may be the flip side of the policy introducing Inca women into these same families. This kind of social engineering is a bit foreign to our understanding, but is the gateway into another system of thought. The Incas are out there, somewhere, while we explore a conundrum of our own making.

Anyone seriously interested in the Andean past should be aware that there is a lot at stake in the details and that we are far from being able to do an ethnography of the Incas. That said, Malpass' book is a thoughtful work that opens the door for the general reader to the Andean past.

Catherine Julien Western Michigan University 

ENDNOTES

1. John Howland Rowe, Inca Culture at the Time of the Spanish Conquest (Washington: Handbook of South American Indians, vol. 2, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 143, 1946); Ann Kendall, Everyday Life of the Incas (New York, 1973).

2. Pedro de Cieza de Leon, Cronica del Peru, Primera Parte (Lima, 1984) cap. xliv, p. 146.

3. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva Cronica y Buen Gobierno (Madrid, 1987) p. 250 [252].