Hierarchy and Space in Incaic Social Organization

Abstract

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. In this article the importance of two types of data concerning social stratification are presented that seem to offer the most promise for expansion in future research. The first type encompasses the ancestral cult system of the Inca royal dynasty; the second type is data on the classifications of local groups called Incas by privilege around Cuzco, or mitimaes around other cities, by way of occupational ranking. Both types of organization were interrelated by the Incas in a system of terms also used in kinship and in making local distinctions. The best way of checking this data in Cuzco is by way of the ceque system. The ancestral cult, as recorded for Cuzco, is only briefly indicated in documents for other parts of Peru. These documents will not be explored at this moment (See Zuidema 1973). Because this cult did not survive the Spanish conquest, how it worked can only be indicated by way of two personal life histories. The first is that of Atahuallpa, the last Inca