Domination without Dominance: Inca-Spanish Encounters in Early Colonial Peru

Abstract

The goal of this book is to provide an alternative historical narrative of the encounter between the Incas and the Spanish that took place during the 20-year transition from contact to colony during 1531 to 1550. The setting is the high mountainous landscape that was the huge extent of the Inca empire, from present-day Ecuador to the north of Argentina and Chile, and in particular the Inca capital city of Cuzco and its environs. Gonzalo Lamana challenges prevailing interpretations of the extraordinary series of events that led to the defeat of the Incas, which are dominated by diverse and rich accounts of conquistadors, witnesses, indigenous participants, and others biased by sixteenth-century Western/Spanish modes of articulation and translation. He presents the long-accepted readings of the early accounts that contrast the heroic superiority of the Christians (Spaniards) with that of their pagan, inferior enemies, but challenges current scholarship that perpetuates similar ideas while attempting to give voice to the indigenous population, albeit with the same Western attitude, or with the more sensational approach that describes a chain of battles, again with the result of Spanish superiority. Domination becomes dominance, whether it is military, social, religious, or cultural. The exceptionally brave, clever, and often quite successful strategies of the Incas have not been given the attention they deserve, and the author sets this straight in a most fascinating way that has the reader cheering for the Incas and respecting their tenacity and survival skills.The strong theoretical framework that informs the book sets the stage for the topics that follow. Lamana dialogues with critical thinking from different disciplines and traditions, with an emphasis on “semiotic realism” as put forth by Ferdinand de Saussure (p. 12). He also compares theoretical discussions of colonial transformations in other locations such as Mexico, India, and New Zealand. Undoubtedly, few societies can compare to the complex nature of the Incas, the king himself and the noble hierarchy, and the vast sociopolitical web of his empire, which may make such comparisons almost unnecessary. At times, the comparisons are even distracting as the message gleaned from rereading the classic documents is revealed. To reread and reinterpret the well-known accounts, Lamana resorts to alternative sources that include local documents produced at the time, probanzas (legal depositions), nativelike narratives once neglected as fictive, and “lapses” in the conquerors’ accounts that were necessary to justify and validate their actions to the Spanish king. He exposes these silences in the record and the many contradictions that exist.The sequence of Inca kings in this short period and the cruel fates of their reigns are keys to the story. From the ruling Inca Atahuallpa to his successor Manca Capac and his all-out war to regain control, to the new Inca, Atahuallpa’s half-brother Paullu, the Inca kings pursued impressive strategies not only to survive in a now-hostile domain of defeat but to retain some semblance of noble, political, and ritual authority. The key figure in the story is Paullu Inca, whose attempt to be an Inca among the Christians was uncertain. Yet he managed to reinvent himself and in this period of supposedly total Spanish dominance was crowned Inca with great ceremony in 1537. While Manco Inca’s war, presented in the chapter titled “Illusions of Mastery,” sets the stage, Paullu’s coronation in the following chapter, titled “The Emergence of a New Mestizo Consciousness,” may be considered the grand summation of the period and the book. All the military, intellectual, ritual, and sociopolitical dynamics that make up this remarkable transition period can now be appreciated not as the trademarks of Spanish conquest but as the beginning of a new world order for the Inca and his people, based on a “strategy of learning and appropriating the Spaniards — their potencies, cosmology, and forms — to then outdo them” (p. 161). The author can now put all the pieces together, and theoretical constructs such as mimicry, mimesis, appropriation, alterity, imitation, magicality, exoticizing, and co-option inform his contention that the landscape of transition is untidy at best, and fraught with danger if the only interpretation is that of the conqueror. It is time to rethink the role of the Inca and look again at the remnants of empire, especially in Cuzco and its surroundings, where feathers, huacas, and apus still carry meaning.