A Visit to the Children of Chaupi Ñamca: From Myth to History via Onomastics and Demography

Abstract

Often, our sources for languages of the past are mythic and prescriptive rather than empirical and descriptive ones: narratives of gods, laws, and so on. As much as we treasure them for linguistic and cultural reasons, for historical and archaeological purposes we would also like to know whether practice actually matched ideals. This chapter presents a method for getting from sacred norms to social history. It concerns the only known book that presents the pre-Christian mythology of an Andean society in an Andean language, namely the Quechua manuscript of Huarochiri (1608). In the segmented Huarochiri society, birth rank was a central principle of hierarchy. An idealized system for naming persons by birth rank is explained. But at the time when the mythology was compiled, was birth-order hierarchy just a cultural memory, or was it contemporary social practice “on the ground”? A 1588 visita or tribute-roll inspection yields a large database concerning the same population from which the text arose. By statistical and probabilistic methods, we show that the Andean birth-rank onomasticon (an onomasticon is a vocabulary or ordered list of proper names) was in fact a wide social practice, not a memory from pre-Hispanic antiquity. But to talk of practice is to also to talk of historic change: in the disastrous early colonial decades leading up to the composition of the Quechua text, name usage was shifting.