Skip to main content

Home/ Groups/ Inca (aymara)
Emily Foley

eHRAF World Cultures - 0 views

  • Bauer, Brian S.. The sacred landscape of the Inca: the Cusco ceque system
  • the Cusco ceque system, a ritual system composed of several hundred shrines in the heartland of the Inca.
  • city of Cusco, the capital of the Inca Empire in the fifteenth century
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Inca, both noble and common, who maintained and worshipped at the shrines, and the Spaniards, who systematically destroyed the shrines in their campaigns against idolatry
Lauren Wilson

Incas - 0 views

  • Inca society was strictly organized, from the emperor and royal family down to the peasants. The emperor was thought to be descended from the sun god, Inti, and he therefore ruled with divine authority. All power rested in his hands. Only the influence of custom and the fear of revolt checked the emperor's power. The emperor had one official wife, but he had many royal concubines and his children by these wives often numbered in the hundreds. The emperor chose his most important administrators from among his sons.Just below the emperor came the aristocracy, which included descendants and relations of all the emperors. These pure-blooded Incas held the most important government, religious, and military posts. The nobles of conquered peoples also became part of the governing aristocracy and were considered Inca by adoption.
  •  
    "Political Organization"
Lauren Wilson

eHRAF World Cultures - 0 views

  • Early chroniclers marveled at the ordered government and favorably compared the infrastructure of administrative centers, way stations, roads, and storage facilities with that of contemporaneous Europe. Later Andeanists cast Inka rule as a despotic monarchy, an enlightened dictatorship, and a feudal, utopian, Asiatic, or socialist state. More-recent treatments have tempered conceptions of a highly controlled, standardized society with the recognition that Inka rule varied notably among regions and that life at the local level may not have changed radically in many areas.
  • Political interaction between the Inkas and their subjects thus ranged from patron-client relations with the elites of small-scale and peripheral societies (e.g., the Pasto of northern Ecuador) to treaty or favored-status relations with some internal polities (e.g., the Chincha and the Lupaqa) and intensive assimilation with a well-developed bureaucracy
  • Because the state depended heavily on local elites, the apparatus of government was tailored to use the authority of ethnic leaders among their own people. Conversely, the local political structures were modified to facilitate state rule.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Initially, they needed to set up an administration that could conduct state affairs in the absence of adequate loyal personnel. Conversely, increasing the organizational abilities of subject groups and the power of subject elites magnified the potential internal threats to the empire.
  • Each province was headed by an Inka-appointed governor (tokrikoq), usually an Inka noble, who directed an array of imperial and local elites and functionaries. The vertical orientation permeated the provincial structure, because the tokrikoq administered the local elites directly below him in the pyramid, rather than the people themselves (Cobo 1956 [1653]: vol. 2., bk. 2, ch. 25, pp. 114–15). The officials from the provincial governor up were recruited from the core Inka nobility, although the offices were not strictly hereditary and ability was considered in making appointments (
  • Whatever the structure, political control was not applied evenly across all societies. Although the Inkas exerted their tightest control near the core of the empire, regions at varying distances from the capital were integrated more fully than were other closer regions, and their human and natural resources more fully exploited.
  • initially, the Inkas found it most effective to deal with the Ecuadorian populations through a single point of native authority—a paramount chief, sometimes elevated to represent a pooled set of smaller chiefdoms.
  • In sum, the Inka political system was initially built on the authority systems of a widely diverging set of subject societies. The evidence suggests that the Inkas were attempting to apply systematic policies to subject groups within the empire. Regional variations in demography, political complexity, native social and economic forms, and security threats—coupled with limited imperial resources, transport, and communications capacities—contributed to variable imperial policies. With this review as context, we may now sketch out the major political changes effected in the Upper Mantaro region under Inka rule.
Katherine Coppe

eHRAF World Cultures - 0 views

  • Page: 181Search Result: Among the many wives a man could have, only one was the chief one and was called a legitimate wife, the one to whom he married by mutual consent and with some solemnity; and she was obeyed by the others and as a proper and legitimate wife had great preëminence and a name different from the rest of them, who were regarded as concubines.
    • Katherine Coppe
       
      marriage
Katherine Coppe

ANT3145Inca - Inca kinship - 0 views

  • Inca kinship groups were the basis for the social hierarchy that eventually formed the political structure of the Empire. At the top of the hierarchy was the Sapa Inca, which meant “Unique Inca”
  • The kin group or ayullu, which an Andean person belonged to, determined the social position of the person in the Empire. The ayllus were separated into tow interdependent halves known as moieties. A moiety was the kinship term that told what ranking you belonged to. There were two main in Cuzco:Hurin (Lower Cuzco) and Hanan (Upper Cuzco) (Bauer and Covey 2002: 850-852). Stephen Wernke (2006:180) defined ayullu it as being "a central to the political, social and economic articulation of territorially discontinous communities in the Andes." Common ancestral deities were at the top of the hierarchy of the ayllus. A member traced his relation to an ayullu an ancestor by myth. The ayullu member performed labor and worship towards their ancestors in the form of feasting and other rituals in order to receive land and resources (Wernke 2006:180).
  • One of the major kinship traditions practiced was intermarriage. Oral history gives account of elite Inca officials marrying women from different ayullus in order to create alliances (Bauer and Covey 2002: 854). This also helped the pan-ethnic strategy the Inca emperors used. Ethnic groups provided secondary wives for the Inca nobles (Bauer and Covey 2002: 854). Unfortunately, it is practically impossible to find archaeological evidence to support this ethno-history.
    • Katherine Coppe
       
      marriage
Katherine Coppe

eHRAF World Cultures - 0 views

  • Page: 252Search Result: In the Inca Empire, the number of a man's wives was an index of his wealth and prestige, and, because the women shared the agricultural work, extra wives also made life easier for the whole family. The ordinary taxpayer, however, was monogamous from necessity. The first wife became the principal one, with precedence over all subsequent ones; if she died, none of the secondary wives could take her place, although the husband was free to marry another principal wife. The Inca explained this as a means of preventing intrigue among the secondary wives. A widow could not remarry unless she were inherited by her husband's brother (the levirate). A son inherited his father's secondary wives who had not borne children. A man might also receive wives by gift from the Emperor or by capturing them in war. A man's foster-mother became his secondary wife when he married and remained so until he had paid off his obligation to her for rearing him (Cobo, 1890–95, bk. 14, ch. 7).
    • Katherine Coppe
       
      marriage Rowe, John Howland, 1918-.Inca culture at the time of the Spanish conquest
Katherine Coppe

Inca Family Unit - 0 views

  • The name of the family unit for the Incas is "ayllu." The Incas lived in extended families, which is a group of clans living together. The leader of each clan was called the "Mallcu." The Mallcu was advised by a group of council elders. However, the Mallcu had to bow to the will of the INCA. (When you see INCA spelled in all capital letters, that is telling you that I am talking about the supreme leader of the Incas.) We will talk about the INCA later. Marriage was a necessity in Incan society because a man could not be considered an adult until he was married. Most men were not married until they were around 20. Just like any other society, monogamy was the norm for the lower classes, but concubines were permitted for the upper classes. Women were able to be married when they could reproduce.
Katherine Coppe

eHRAF World Cultures - 0 views

  • Page: 6Search Result: The Inkan extended family as a unit was associated with others into the larger, generally patrilineal, AYLLU, a local kin grouping, frequently identified with the lineage. Service states, however, that "the AYLLU was not a clan of the sort possessed by so many American Indian tribes; it was not unilateral or exogamous or totemic. It was probably much like the genealogical, corporate kin group of the Polynesians, although specific and conclusive information is lacking" (Service 1958, 326).
    • Katherine Coppe
       
      kinship Bray, Tamara L.Culture summary: Inka
Katherine Coppe

Peru - The Incas - 0 views

  • Although displaying distinctly hierarchical and despotic features, Incan rule also exhibited an unusual measure of flexibility and paternalism. The basic local unit of society was the ayllu, which formed an endogamous nucleus of kinship groups who possessed collectively a specific, although often disconnected, territory. In the ayllu, grazing land was held in common (private property did not exist), whereas arable land was parceled out to families in proportion to their size. Since self-sufficiency was the ideal of Andean society, family units claimed parcels of land in different ecological niches in the rugged Andean terrain. In this way, they achieved what anthropologists have called "vertical complementarity," that is, the ability to produce a wide variety of crops--such as maize, potatoes, and quinoa (a protein-rich grain)--at different altitudes for household consumption.
  • The principle of complementarity also applied to Andean social relations, as each family head had the right to ask relations, allies, or neighbors for help in cultivating his plot. In return, he was obligated to offer them food and chicha (a fermented corn alcoholic beverage), and to help them on their own plots when asked. Mutual aid formed the ideological and material bedrock of all Andean social and productive relations. This system of reciprocal exchange existed at every level of Andean social organization: members of the ayllus, curacas (local lords) with their subordinate ayllus, and the Inca himself with all his subjects.
  • Ayllus often formed parts of larger dual organizations with upper and lower divisions called moieties, and then still larger units, until they comprised the entire ethnic group. As it expanded, the Inca state became, historian Nathan Wachtel writes, "the pinnacle of this immense structure of interlocking units. It imposed a political and military apparatus on all of these ethnic groups, while continuing to rely on the hierarchy of curacas, who declared their loyalty to the Inca and ruled in his name." In this sense, the Incas established a system of indirect rule that enabled the incorporated ethnic groups to maintain their distinctiveness and self-awareness within a larger imperial system.
blonabocker

Wikispace - 5 views

started by blonabocker on 09 Apr 13 no follow-up yet
‹ Previous 21 - 31 of 31
Showing 20 items per page