Inca Modern Culture Essay

Brittanie Jones

October 5^th 2010

ANTH 263 Fall 2010

To be an Inca in modern Peru is to be a patchwork quilt of identities. From the seat of the old Incan Empire, in Cusco, radiating outwards like the beams of the sun that granted life to the Inca’s crops and herds; there are many peoples who call upon the old kingdom in describing their heritage and parts of their current way of life.

Incan heritage in Peru is seen, as it has been since the Spanish invasion, through two different lenses. One view is through the eye of the everyday Andean: the farmer, with his llamas, his potatoes, his family, and the intricate interconnected social structure of his village (Allen 2002). The other is seen through the perspective of the upper class, the mestizos, who have light skin and not only look down openly upon the natives, but exploit their heritage openly in the marketing of Inca tourism within the city of Cuzco (Silverman 2007 and Silverman 2008). Cuzco itself is a city of layered identity, much like the Andean people (Allen 2002). The Incas built their Cuzco, the navel of their empire, upon an existing site (Wikipedia 2010), and, in turn, the Spanish constructed their colonial one on top of Incan walls (Isbell Lectures).

Outside the sprawling tourist trap of Cuzco, it is easier to get an idea of how the Incas, or the indigenous peoples the Incas ruled over, may have lived. All throughout the hard-to-reach mountains of Peru, people still carry on with aspects of their lives in the same manner as farmers hundreds of years ago. This can be attributed to how well adapt the agricultural, and consequently, the spiritual practices of the Andean people are to the environments around them; their culture is tailored impeccably to the ranges they inhabit. They are respectful and take care to share with every notable object around them, from the great mountain ranges, the Tirakuna, right down to the Pachamama, the mother earth beneath their feet. They are completely interconnected with their environment, trapped in cycles of owing, much like in their own social connections, which are a web of give and take. (Allen 2002)

The majority of the Andean environment consists of the highlands, the coastlands, valleys and the tropical rainforests of modern Peru and Ecuador. The Incan Empire included both the highest mountain and the driest desert in the world (Isbell Lectures). The variety of climates, elevations, and water availability allowed for a system of irrigation and terracing to develop and flourish in these areas. Also, a wide variety of plants were domesticated and used, with different vegetation types adapting for the various temperatures and elevations traversed by the Andeans. The level of botanical diversity in the Andes helps protect crops from disease and pestilence, which can decimate millions of dollars of crops in countries where monocultures are prevalent. (Pollan 2006) Both in the past and today, Andean people maintain and utilize an extended territory. Their crops may be at one low elevation, yet they will graze their herds of llama and alpaca at a much higher one, on the puna, where only excellent grazing forage for the camilids grows and thrives. The Andeans are extremely mobile and utilize every available resource they have access to as fully as possible. (Isbell lectures 2010)

Because of the cool temperatures of the Andes, both in Inca times and today, woven materials are highly valued. Llamas and alpacas produce an incredibly touchable yarn, which is spun by hand and woven or knitted into garments of varying quality. Sheep’s wool is also incorporated, as introduced by the Spaniards. In Inca times, women paid their taxes to the empire in woven materials, and the finest textiles were considered more valuable than gold. This tradition continues into the current day, deeply embedded and intertwined with the spiritual practices of the native peoples of the Andes. (Allen, Kitty 2002)

Modern descendants of the Incas may choose to include their heritage in their everyday life on various levels. Some are immersed in farming practice and ritual that has a nearly unbroken continuum from the time of Incan conquest, whereas other, usually younger, generations tend to fight against their traditional obligations in favor of a more westernized lifestyle. This pattern is seen again and again in places where native cultures overlap with European invaders. Social stratification and rampant racism play a crucial part in urging the younger generations of Andean natives to sever ties with their rich cultural heritage. The pressures of social stratification came to a boiling point in the early 1980s, when Abimael Guzmán, a university professor at San Cristóbal of Huamanga University, organized an internal conflict that rocked Peru for the next two decades. (in-class documentary) Although the upper class was kept in the dark until attacks on the capital escalated, every Peruvian has been touched by the violence of the Sendero Luminoso in some way. Most affected, however, were the indigenous peoples in the rural countryside. The rebels hid among these towns, committing heinous acts of violence against the very villages they had been born in. Simultaneously, their presence in these villages drew the military into those areas. Most military personnel did not know Quechua, the native language (that they were not taught any is another signifier of the deep rift between social classes in Peru), and therefore they couldn’t determine which townspeople were rebel and which were innocent civilians. Many brutal extrajudicial killings resulted from both this careless occupation by the senderistas and the military’s casual disregard for the lives of citizens in these rural communities. (in class documentary)

After this brutal conflict, many Peruvians still chose the path of forgetfulness. Even though a council was formed to seek out and publicize the truth of what happened during the internal conflict, many chose to blame the senderistas in full for the outbreak of rebellion. A monument called The Eye that Cries, erected to honor the memory of all the lives lost in the conflict, was the source of a heated debate, the belief that rebel names didn’t belong in the monument was widespread, and caused the piece to be fenced off from the public. (Drinot 2006) It is hard to blame the Peruvians for wanting to forget such terrible events. Humanity as a whole has a history of selectively forgetting, such as the United States’ own brutal relationship of exploitation and betrayal of American Indians. (Brown 1970)

The rebellion of the Sendero Luminoso is not the only past violence that Peruvians chose to sweep under the rug. Tensions and racism still persists, remnants from as far back as the invasion of the Spanish Conquistadors in the mid-1500s. The attempt to destroy native cultures was a part of Spain’s own brand of slash and burn New World domination. First, indigenous peoples were weakened by disease, which blanketed the landscape long before the arrival of troops. Then, any scholars and priests would be disposed of. Puppet emperors were set into place, and before long the Spanish empire was comfortably seated at the head of a new territory. Papal decree that the indigenous peoples were human, had souls, and must be converted, was long to take effect, and although Catholicism is interwoven into the beliefs of the native peoples, there still exists a substantial rift between classes and races. (web reading, Spanish encomiendas)

Despite the concerted efforts of the conquistadors to eradicate Incan culture in the Andes, the languages and practices of the rural people exist in a continuum from ancient times. By studying the ethnography of these peoples, using first hand Spanish Colonial accounts, and piecing together evidence from archeological sites, ideas of what everyday life in Inca civilization would have been like. The people of the Andes seamlessly integrate ancient ideologies with Spanish colonial ones, and, in spite of the pressures of racism and violence, manage to cling to an identity as unique and fascinating as the environment they inhabit.

Cited Works

Brown, Dee

1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee New York: Holt, Rineheart and Winston

Allen, Katherine

2002 The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community. Smithsonian Institute

Pollan, Michael

2006 The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. The Penguin Press

Silverman, Helaine

2007 Contemporary Museum Practice in Cusco, Peru. In Archaeology and Capitalism. From Ethics to Politics, edited by Philip Duke and Yannis Hamilakis, pp. 195-212. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek.

2008 Mayor Daniel Estrada and the Plaza De Armas of Cuzco, Peru. Heritage management, volume 1 issue 2 181-217

Drinot, Paulo

2009 For whom the eye cries: memory, monumentality, and the ontologies of violence

in peru. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 18: 1, 15 — 32

Sandweiss, Daniel H. and James B. Richardson III

2008 Central Andean Environments. In Handbook of South American Archaeology, edited by Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell, pp. 93-104. Springer Science & Business Media, LLC, New York.

From the Web:

Spanish Administration and Encomienda