Review: Scale and the Incas, by Andrew James Hamilton

Abstract

Andrew James Hamilton Scale and the Incas Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018, 304 pp., 105 color and 55 b/w illus. $65 (cloth), ISBN 9780691172736 Andrew James Hamilton's new book, Scale and the Incas , begins by situating scale—and assumptions concerning its interpretation—as not only inevitably relational but also socially constructed. This process is made more precarious by a move from the ancient past to the present, as in the case of the opening discussion, which ranges from the Andes to Harvard's Peabody Museum. Hamilton focuses in particular on the creation of reduced-scale objects as a persistent practice throughout the Andean world but notes that scale was not necessarily manipulated or understood in the same ways throughout that world. Scale was what he terms a “recursive mode of expression” (6), one that linked diverse objects, people, places, and practices. Hamilton opens with a detailed discussion of the challenges involved in characterizing the concept of scale among Andean cultures. For the Inca, the situation is made especially acute by the lack of any word for “scale” in the Quechua language, despite the fact that Quechua does have words for “small” and “large.” Notwithstanding these difficulties, Hamilton carefully contextualizes Inca understandings of scale on its own terms, rather than extrapolating these meanings through the legacy of European intellectual traditions. Yet he is also cognizant, in the face of a colonial past, of the dangers of scaled relationships becoming lost in translation and becoming victims of the vagaries of time and conquest. With scale, Hamilton insists, one must always understand the referent in order to determine whether an object has been reduced, enlarged, or presented at a commensurate scale. If the referent goes unrecognized, so does the message. Hamilton's goal is not to isolate “what scale symbolized” for the Incas but rather to demonstrate that scale represented, in …