Uneasy Compromises

Abstract

This chapter explores how autochthonous structures of community organization—and their spatially dispersed manifestations in the built environment and landscape, came to articulate with Spanish colonial administration during the era of mass-resettlement into reducción towns built on an urban grid plan under the regime of the Viceroy Francisco de Toledo. It first considers the location of reducciónes in the Colca Valley, noting the considerable coincidence between the primary Inkaic administrative centers and the reducciones—a pattern of overbuilding that would have minimally disrupted their large, generally higher-status populations. Second, the chapter traces how the complex hierarchical schemas of hybrid local-Inkaic community structures articulated with the Inkaic and (subsequent) Toledan tributary extractive system. It shows how supra-local networks of kindred (ayllu) affiliation continued to structure relations of production, exchange, and consumption after resettlement, and thus traces out the improvised order that emerged from the grafting of colonial administration to extant structures of community and landscape.